Local News as Gothic Texture

I have a deep and slightly embarrassing love for the small local newspaper, the real one, the thin weekly that covers a town too small to interest anyone but itself, and my love is not nostalgic, or not only. It is that I have come to see the local paper as one of the most quietly gothic documents a community produces — a place where a town narrates its entire self, the births and the deaths and the crimes and the bake sales, in a single flat democratic voice that puts all of it on the same page at the same size, and the effect of that flatness, once you feel it, is stranger and more unsettling than anything the paper intends.

Because the local paper has no sense of proportion, and I mean that as praise. The metropolitan paper sorts and ranks; it knows a murder is bigger than a fundraiser and it arranges them accordingly, in a hierarchy of importance that keeps everything in its proper place. The local paper cannot do this, because in a small place everything is local, everything is ours, and so the paper lays it all out flat and adjacent: the report of a death next to the notice of a wedding, the court briefs beside the school honour roll, a genuine tragedy sharing column inches with the results of the flower show, all in the same plain typeface, all in the same unhurried voice, because to the town they are all simply the news, the things that happened to us this week, and the paper is the record of us, and we do not rank ourselves.

The blotter and the obituaries

The two great gothic engines of the local paper are the police blotter and the obituaries, and they sit near each other, and between them they hold the whole of a town’s dread and grief in the most compressed and flattened form imaginable.

The blotter is a masterpiece of the genre and nobody thinks of it as writing at all. A resident of Water Street reported a dispute with a neighbour over a property line. A wallet was reported stolen from a vehicle. Police responded to a report of a disturbance and no charges were laid. Read it flat and it is nothing. Read it as what it is — a week’s worth of a small community’s frictions and fears and small violences, rendered in the most neutral language the law allows — and it is a whole gothic novel in miniature, a catalogue of the things that go wrong between people who cannot get away from each other, the dispute over the property line that is really twenty years of something else, the disturbance with no charges laid that is a family everyone knows is in trouble, compressed into one merciful clause so that it can be printed without shame. The blotter is the town’s dread, filed under public record, in the passive voice.

And the obituaries are the town’s ongoing, weekly, uncompromising death toll — the one part of the paper that never has a slow week, because someone is always dying, and the obituaries record it, in their own strange dialect of euphemism and code that everyone local can read. Passed away peacefully and died suddenly and after a long illness bravely borne are not neutral phrases; they are a language, and the town reads them fluently, knows exactly what suddenly means and what peacefully is covering and what is not being said in the list of who the deceased is survived by and who has, pointedly, been left off. The obituary is where a community writes its dead into the record every single week, in a form so conventional it looks like nothing and is actually the most important genre the paper runs, because it is the town keeping its own count, refusing to let anyone leave unremarked, insisting that even the smallest life gets its paragraph and its list of survivors and its place on the page next to the bake sale.

The classifieds, and the paper dying

And down in the back, the classifieds, which are tiny ghost stories every one. Moving, must sell. Estate sale, contents of home. Lost: grey cat, answers to Smokey, family heartbroken. For sale: complete set of woodworking tools, no longer needed. Read the classifieds of a small paper and you are reading a town’s losses and departures and downsizings and deaths in the most compressed possible form — no longer needed, three words, a whole retirement or death or defeat behind them — a back page full of the small endings that a community sheds every week, advertised for a few dollars, gone by next issue.

And the local paper is dying, of course, which is the part that makes this a Dead Media essay and not just an appreciation, because they are closing everywhere, the thin weeklies, starved of advertising, bought up and hollowed out and shuttered, and when a town loses its paper it does not just lose the news. It loses the record of itself — the flat democratic voice that put the murder and the bake sale on the same page, that kept the blotter and the obituaries and the classifieds, that narrated the community to itself week after week so that the community could see itself whole. After the paper goes, the deaths still happen but no longer get their paragraph; the frictions still occur but no longer make the record; the town keeps happening but stops being written down, and a place that has stopped narrating itself has begun, in a real way, to disappear, because a community is partly a story it tells about itself, and the local paper was where it told it.

So I keep reading them, the thin weeklies, while there are any left. The blotter, the obituaries, the classifieds, the flower show. It is the most gothic reading there is, once you learn the register — a whole town’s dread and grief and small endings, laid out flat and adjacent in one plain voice, refusing to rank itself, insisting that all of it is simply the news, the things that happened to us this week, written down, because we are here, and it matters that we were.