Early this April, Worth Weller, owner of the weekly News-Journal of North Manchester, Indiana, wrote the owner of the local Ace Hardware, Roger Moore. The letter was retrieved from the Ace Hardware box and read by Roger’s wife, Judy.
North Manchester, a town of some 6,000 people in Wabash County in northeastern Indiana, is a sensible place–its rural conservatism blended comfortably with the progressivism of Manchester College. Paula Adams, a graduate of the liberal arts college, says proudly that over half the faculty has studied abroad and that on a per capita basis the school produces more Fulbright scholars than Harvard.
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Odom says he held his own in 2000, but last year his top ad salesperson quit and the News-Journal headed south. Folks around town began to worry that they’d be going from a local paper they didn’t much like to no paper at all. This prospect troubled Paula Adams, a retired family therapist married to a retired doctor–her husband, Parks Adams, is a Quaker who switched from engineering to medicine in midlife. There’s something sacred about the press in Paula Adams’s view, and after giving brief thought to trying to buy the News-Journal, she and Judy Moore decided to start their own paper. They organized an advisory board, quizzed a lot of journalists from out of town on how to do things, and last October launched the Monitor.
Professing enthusiasm, Weller made it his first order of business to reassure advertisers that the News-Journal was returning to normal. But now it had competition.
Whatever Weller might have intended by this letter, to Roger Moore it was “very childish,” to Judy Moore “a bunch of garbage.” Cheryl Wilson, to whom Judy Moore immediately showed the letter, chooses even stronger words. “It’s like sending a letter to a man saying ‘Your wife’s cheating on you. Here are the pictures.’”
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Something else Denny started is a feature called “Speaking Out.” Since townspeople hesitate to say what’s on their mind when it can easily come back to haunt them, “Speaking Out” allows them to call in anonymously and leave recorded messages that the paper prints. A couple of readers noted the above line item and in the next installment of “Speaking Out” asked: “Where in the world did John Mugford go that his plane ticket cost $1,293.12?”
