Whitewater has its own paper, the seventy-five-cents-a-copy Whitewater Register. Although it’s merely one part of the Southern Lakes Newspapers chain, the Register still lays claim to being Whitewater’s home paper. The Register‘s banner proudly proclaims that the paper is in its 151st year, proof that a century and a half of effort sometimes comes to nothing.
Consider the recent, May 24th edition. Although the newspaper comes in two principal section (plus numerous inserts), only the first section, pages 1 through 16, has news about Whitewater. The second section, entitled “Marketplace,” does not even purport to focus on Whitewater; the section’s subheading is “Southern Lakes Newspapers,” and most of the ads are for other communities in Walworth County.
If we return to the principal section, however, we’ll find that the lead story is hardly news unique to Whitewater; it’s a dull, generic story about cicadas, with an accompanying story on cicada recipes. The story could run in any small town paper in the Southern Lakes chain, offering nothing of unique interest to Whitewater. (Sleep easy: there’s nothing reported to suggest that the cicadas in Whitewater will be louder, or more prevalent, than in nearby towns.)
Carrie Dampier has two other front-page stories, a right column story on roadwork along our east side, and — below the fold — a story on Police Day in Whitewater. (I’ll post about Dampier’s Police Day story tomorrow, because at least it is unique; it’s a laughably bad, poorly written story.) The second part of main paper includes sports stories from Whitewater.
If you want news — school, city, town, community events, local sports — the Whitewater Banner is a much better choice. I believe that Jim Stewart’s Banner only took off last fall, but already it offers more Whitewater information — delivered more quickly — than the 151 year-old Whitewater Register. The Register‘s website is stale, and not worth a visit. I wouldn’t expect the Whitewater Banner to report any critical, detailed stories on the challenges in Whitewater, but then again, one doesn’t find that in the Register, anyway. Stewart delivers more information on the city, more quickly, than the Register, by leaps and bounds.
Merchants in our city understand how ineffectual the Register has become, as they’re unwilling to waste their money advertising in its principal pages. Of the more than sixty principal ads in the main section of the May 24th Register, a majority are for businesses located outside Whitewater. Many of our local businesses shun the Register, whose pages are crowded with advertisements for businesses in Fort Atkinson, Eagle, Palmyra, and Burlington, among other towns. Our local businesses are free to advertise in the Register; if they choose not to do so, it’s because they recognize that their advertising budgets are better spent elsewhere. If the Register were a better, more compelling paper for Whitewater, then it would attract more local advertising. The failure is not of our local businesses, but is the failure of the self-professed local paper that’s increasingly irrelevant to them.
Tomorrow: An example of how the Whitewater Register is so uncritically fawning that it fails our community.