A few years ago I was working with the State Emergency Management Office and FEMA, handling communications for an ice storm in southeastern Oklahoma. One day, the FEMA representative and I tucked our pants in our boots and braved the mud and ice covered roads to visit newspaper editors and radio news directors in the surrounding towns. The newspaper for one little town, I don’t recall the name, was officed in an old wood-framed house across from the grade school. Their newspaper machine was a cardboard box with a rock holding the papers in place and a metal box where people put their money and grabbed a local paper, all on the honor system.

According to a recent study by the Federal Communications Commission (http://nyti.ms/jvTF6W) these papers, and others like them across the country, are disappearing. All the while, online news sources are increasing. I can’t help but think of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Water Water Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink.”

No doubt there are those who don’t think the loss of local news is such a bad thing. I mean, what could the Broken Arrow Ledger tell us that Anderson Cooper can’t? Is there anything worth reading in the Elk City Daily News that’s not on Gawker? And though I don’t remember the town, I remember that day’s headline was about a local resident that turned 98 years old and how most of the town turned out for her birthday party at the First Baptist Church. It was then that I realized the true power of local news. If you want to find out what’s happening in Broken Arrow or Elk City or Muskogee or Edmond for that matter, there’s only one place to go, the local paper.

You see, each town is like a microcosm of news, a biosphere of information. And if you want to inform the residents of that town, sure, you can try television or the Internet, but the one sure-fire way to get their attention is a story in their local paper.

I consider myself very lucky to have traveled Oklahoma as much as I have throughout my career in public relations. And I always grabbed a local paper and brought it back to the office. I read it, and then put it in a stack and proudly cluttered my office with them, to the aggravation of my co-workers. But those talks with small-town editors in coffee shops, old downtown store fronts and even old houses taught me a lot. It made me realize that, yes, what’s going on in Congress is important. And there are those that think the same thing about Paris Hilton or the cast of Twilight. But to the people who get up every day and plow the fields and run the drugstore counters and teach class in the old WPA school buildings, the latest political scandal is neat and all, but the real question is, what time is the homecoming parade before the game because the kids have worked so hard on the floats and I want to take pictures.