This story was originally published by ProPublica.
A sign that reads “Somewhere Worth Seeing” welcomes travelers to Ware, a faded mill town surrounded by the hills and steeples of western Massachusetts. But these days, hardly any news outlets find Ware worth a visit, even as its leaders wrangle over issues vital to its future.
Inside the brick, fortress-like Town Hall on a humid summer evening, Town Manager Stuart Beckley informed the five members of the Selectboard, Ware’s council, of an important proposal. A company was offering to buy Ware’s water and sewer services, which need tens of millions of dollars in upgrades. That’s a consequential choice for a town of 10,000 with an annual budget of $36 million. A sale would provide an infusion of $9.7 million. But private utilities often increase rates, raising the prospect that Ware’s many poor and elderly residents might face onerous bills down the road.
As smaller newspapers shrink or disappear, it’s easy to romanticize the role they played. But one reporter’s memories of the heyday of local journalism reveal a much more complicated reality.
The Selectboard didn’t reach a consensus that night. Instead, one of the members berated Beckley for moving ahead with privatizing even though the position of town planner had been vacant since March. “We’ve been through four of them … in less than six years,” Keith Kruckas said. “So we’re not going to blame it on COVID. We’re not going to blame it on other towns paying more money. We’re going to blame it on poor management.”
From there, the discussion descended into bickering between Kruckas and Beckley. “You’ve been harping all night, point after point after point,” Beckley said. “So is there anything that I do that you like?”
I thought Ware residents should know about the challenges their town faces and its decision-makers’ squabbling. But I was the only journalist among the six onlookers in the room, and I wasn’t there to cover the board. There was nobody from a daily newspaper in the area or from a television or radio station.
Decades ago, at least three outlets sent reporters to every session of Ware’s governing board: a weekly community paper, a local radio station and my old employer, the Daily News in Springfield, the third biggest city in Massachusetts. Daily News reporters covered towns throughout western Massachusetts and into northern Connecticut. The paper had a correspondent who focused on Ware and a few nearby towns, and he attended meetings of town officials from the Board of Assessors to the Cemetery Commission.
Today, Ware is close to becoming a news desert. Townspeople complain that the media have forgotten them, Beckley told me. What remains, he said, is “a lot of Facebook speculation, where people are guessing at the news. It’s quite rampant here.”
One reporter from the weekly paper, the Ware River News (circulation: 4,200), did watch the Selectboard meeting. Paula Ouimette caught it on Zoom because she was too busy to show up in person. Ouimette is also the paper’s editor, copy editor, proofreader, photographer and office manager, and she writes the police log. She fills similar roles for another weekly: the Quaboag Current. The papers cover a total of nine towns, and Ouimette said she can barely keep up. “If I tell people the hours I work,” she told me, “no one would enter this field.” Continue reading “Local newspapers are vanishing. How should we remember them?”
