While I believe we will continue to look to the big city newspapers to set the agenda of our national conversation, there remains only one news source that carried the announcement of my birth, or wrote of my one-run triple the summer I played softball; it celebrated my wedding and, someday, will document my passing. And that source is my hometown paper, one of those small papers.

What gets printed in them is what is imprinted in us. They are composed of pieces of history that we carefully clip from newsprint and tenderly press into family bibles.

To work on one of those newspapers..how important is that?

At a small paper, you get immediate feedback. If you screw up, you hear about it…often in person, sometimes in your face. Tends to instill a healthy respect for your readers and the need for accuracy.

A good number of my fellow students feel that success is determined by the size of the paper you work for. In my experience, I’ve been able to get so much more hands-on with community papers than with metro papers. There’s satisfaction to be had when a town relies on and expects you to cover their local swim meet or a fire on Main Street and then to hear them talk about it.

A newspaper is a provider of credible information. It’s a place where people know they can turn to get whatever information they need, whether it’s an in-depth analysis of the presidential campaign or what time the potluck starts at the church down the street. Both are equally important in the eyes of citizens, whether they’d like to admit it or not…

I started at an 18,000 circulation daily in Western Kansas. It was a great job, and many of my readers thanked me for providing them information that they wouldn’t otherwise get - sometimes on opposites sides of an issue such as a school closing. I worked hard, but I got a lot from the small communities I served, and it taught me a lot about journalism.

Using alpha versions of the pioneering web browser Mosaic at University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in the early 1990s gave me an early interest in the Web. In 1998, I leveraged that interest to go from Kansas to Washington DC with the BBC via a couple of jobs in Michigan. Having a grounding in local news is one of the reasons that I embraced blogging. It reminded me of the direct connection I had with my audience in Kansas.