We Need Our Storytellers Back: The Case for Reviving Rural Newspapers

In small towns, a newspaper is more than a paper. It’s where we read our kid’s name on the honor roll or hear about the last speaker at the rotary club. It’s how we know when the levee board meets or who won the girls' high school basketball game. It’s the memory keeper, the watchdog, and the thread that ties us together.

Me playing for the Lady Greyhounds, going up for two of my 16 points in our season opener in 2004. The Newport Daily Independent ran the story to make sure the community of Jackson County knew what their hometown kids were up to.

But rural newspapers across Arkansas and the country are reducing publication frequency or disappearing altogether. More than 2,500 local papers have shut down since 2005. And when that happens, something breaks. It gets a little easier for corruption to take root. A little harder for people to show up. A little lonelier in towns where the front page used to carry our names.

Without a local paper, we don’t just lose information—we lose identity.

I grew up in a place where the newspaper, The Newport Daily Independent, mattered. Generations of my family’s names (since 1904) appeared in it for births, harvests, basketball games, school board meetings, and business ventures. When we had a story to tell—good or bad—it was printed in black and white. And everyone saw it. That kind of shared truth? It matters.

Today, misinformation travels faster than the truth, and our rural communities are left in the dark. That’s not by accident. When corporate media pulls out and political agendas fill the vacuum, rural America gets talked about—but rarely spoken to.

The famous Harryette Hodges of Newport wrote this article about my parents, Wendy and John Shoffner, discussing their groundbreaking agricultural research in Newport. “There’s a lot of handwork in what we do,” my mom said. The reporter called it “an enormous amount of manual labor,” but also documented something more: that two people came to a small town with big ideas and helped put it on the ag innovation map.

We need to bring back robust rural journalism.

We need public funding, nonprofit models, and community investment to keep our stories alive. We need local reporters covering school boards and soil conditions—not just national drama. We need storytellers rooted in the place, who know the roads by name and the people by heart.

Because when we stop telling our own stories, someone else will tell them for us—and they’ll get it wrong.