Independent newspapers provide healthy dose of local flavor

Paul Bowers

Tagline: Pleading the First

This week, I read the single greatest paragraph in the English language. Have you braced yourself yet? Here it is, word for word:

“As Minsker tells it, Yaki got crazy during a rocking performance of Billy Ocean’s ‘Caribbean Queen.’ Yaki poured a Colt 45 over his head, sliced open his plastic wrap diaper, removed two ham hocks from it and threw them into the audience, hitting someone squarely in the face. ‘From there on out, it was total chaos,’ Minsker says.”

Even having read these sentences in their proper context—a feature story about a legendary Columbia hippie enclave and music venue—I laughed until I thought my kidneys would burst. The source? The Sept. 19-25 issue of Free Times, one of Columbia’s better-known independent newspapers.

Coming from the Charleston area, I have long been a fan of similar publications. Their sheer audacity and freewheeling spirit always make for a more exciting read than well-established papers like The State or Charleston’s The Post & Courier, even if the journalism is sometimes sub-par.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t depend on Free Times to provide me with a well-balanced portrayal of current events. For that, a degree of stodgy professionalism is of course necessary. But if I want to read a frank account of Pride Week ’07 festivities, a Bum of the Week feature or a column on the “death of cool” in Five Points, I will always turn first to the likes of Columbia City Paper.

The independents also tend to have strong points in their entertainment sections, with exhaustive listings of upcoming concerts and well-informed media reviews. They support local artists through extensive coverage and promotion, and they play a vital role in the preserving the unique cultures of major cities around the nation.

News coverage is rarely up to industry standards in terms of objectivity and professionalism in these smaller papers. It is a safe bet that any major news story in the Columbia City Paper will come with a side order of saucy rhetoric and unabashed bias, but even that is a part of the appeal. The State would probably never cover the closing of a local bar, and the headline “Red Tub screwed, ‘slumlord’ owns building” (Columbia City Paper, Vol. 3, Issue 3) would most definitely never make it past their editors.

True, these papers are often plastered with tacky advertisements for strip clubs and dating services. True also, the choice and presentation of stories can reflect a defective moral compass.

That is, I suppose, the true nature of local flavor—quirky, sometimes offensive and almost always slanted. I rarely agree with the socially and politically liberal views represented in most independent papers, but I respect their nerve.

In this age of AP syndication and corporate buyouts, a locally owned and staffed publication is a refreshing sight. While the copy editing is slipshod at best and the flashy headlines often border on sensationalistic, reading these bastions of local eclecticism will always be a guilty pleasure for this uptight journalist.