I write a (mostly) regular feature called Register Watch™, where I offer commentary on our local weekly newspaper, The Whitewater Register. The Register has been published for over a century, and is now part of an area newspaper chain.
The paper’s viewpoint, seeping out into story after story, comes close to an insistence that Whitewater is a latter-day Eden. If the fictional town Pleasantville had a newspaper, it would be very much like the Register.
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I’ll offer a new town slogan: — Whitewater: Live the Satire Others Only Dream About.
Front Page.
The lead story of the paper’s Thursday, August 28th edition is entitled, “More Bang for the Bus,” describing a new bus contract with our local school district. I have no idea who wrote the headline, but one seldom encounters clever wordplay like this these days. Crossword puzzles are easier, Scientific American long-since junked many of its challenging columns, and papers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal just can’t manage a well-turned phrase anymore.
Fear not these declining standards — Whitewater still has the Register.
I’m not as concerned about how students get to school as about what they do when they arrive. I’m just old-fashioned that way. A bus contract is hardly a headline story, unless the bus offers a built-in bathroom, hot tub, and plasma television. The least one might expect is that the bus would be safe, but it’s not as though the local bus company builds the buses.
Inside.
If one looks at the stories and advertisements in the paper, one sees that many of them are for out-of-town events and merchants. The back page of the paper is soon to become a section for Delavan advertisers – recently for Historic Delavan, and now for a Delavan auto dealer.
We have auto dealers and shops in historic Whitewater, but they don’t have such prominent ads in the Register. (The Historic Delavan half-page ad is still in the Register – it’s just moved farther to the front of the paper.) Our merchants advertise elsewhere.
It’s not that the Register won’t cover a political story – it’s that they cover it from an incumbents’ and town fathers’ point of view. Readers are moving elsewhere, and that empty space fills with generic Walworth County stories and out-of-town ads.