Why I Like Small Towns

Journalists have preferences about what kinds of things they cover. Some like the event coverage, some like magaziney-featurey stuff, some like straight up hard news.

But each journalist also has preferences about WHERE they like to cover. Metro, college town, small town, they're all different.

As for myself, I prefer small towns.

Before I start off, let me tell you where I'm coming from.

I grew up in Columbia, Missouri, which is a modest-sized city of around 100,000 people. I never really paid attention to the paper there, the Tribune, but I can guess what would be covered.

When I was in middle school, my family lived in Singapore, due to my father's work for 3M. Since it was another country, I don't know if I can equate my knowledge of journalism to that, since laws and practices would be drastically different. But the reason I mention this is to say that I have definitely experienced living in a mega-city. Singapore is around 15 by 30 miles big, and has around five million people in it.

Yeah, it's dense.

After that, my family moved to Hutchinson, Minnesota, a town of 15,000. This is where I first got involved in journalism in high school after job-shadowing the editor of the local paper there, the Leader. I wrote monthly for the paper all through high school, and then interned there during college a few years back.

While in Lawrence for journalism school at KU, I read the Journal-World regularly, and worked at/read the University Daily Kansan.

Now that I'm here in Kansas City, I read the Kansas City Star.

Here's the point. I have lived and experienced both big-city and small-town journalism.

And I really prefer small-town work.

I had an interview today at the Miami County Republic, a small biweekly paper in Paola, Kansas, and I really hope I get a job there. There's something different about working in a small town.

In a reporting gig in a big paper, you're pretty limited. You're the concert reporter for this side of town, that kind of thing. You only cover city council meetings. For every working of the city, there's a reporter to cover it.

In a small town, the same sort of things happen. Crime, city council, everything. But smaller papers don't have the staff to have a dedicated reporter for every little section of content, so reporters get to do a little bit of everything.

Assuming (hopefully) that I got this position, I would most likely cover everything from a new Dairy Queen owner (that story did actually run in Republic) to the latest property dispute, all in addition to probably taking my own pictures and creating the online content.

Since the j-school at KU harps "convergence" all the time and makes us practice it all (writing, shooting, editing, etc.), I feel like I would be exercising only half my knowledge were I to work in a small beat at a big paper.

I prefer the smaller town journalism because you still get to cover big issues, you just have the opportunity to cover them a lot more intimately.

And I would get to take pictures.