Democrat Herald Field Trip

Just a week or so after my son's scout troop got a tour of the Democrat Herald, my class got to go too!

Our tour was a little different, we didn't get to play with the magic board and our tour guide didn't take our picture and write a funny story about us. But it was still fun.

Steve Lundeberg, the DH's Associate Editor, showed us around the news room. We saw the writers and editors striving to meet the "never later than noon" deadline. We saw the presses run that day's edition. And we learned some of the inner workings of our local newspaper.

Gathered in the conference room, with one wall fully mounted with previous editions and their sales statistics, we discussed the history and future of the paper.

What we learned:


1. Kids and horses up the sales. Statistics show that sales are higher when animals or children are on the front page.

I forgot that a newspaper is a business. I always assumed that the biggest story would make the front page. But how is the biggest story identified? The DH keeps statistics on their best selling recent newspapers on display with statistics. According to Steve, the best sellers tend to have horses and children on the front.


2. Small towns like the printed page. Even though the DH is online and its writers have blogs, the news will continue to be printed on paper. It offers a sense of community that is sometimes lost in the papers of larger cities. Steve said that part of the appeal of a small town paper is that "people in towns this size are always going to want to be able to read the actual paper." Chances are high that someone a reader knows will be in print.

3. The DH is stacked to the rafters. There are giant heavy dusty books in a mezzanine at the DH that hold volumes of the newspaper dating back to the 1900's! Sometimes research necessitates reporters and editors to bring these to the main level. Such a cumbersome task, that the bound volumes are not returned until a stack has accumulated. This is a piece of history that would be fun to look into, in spite of Steve's warnings of "black lung." Because this is such small town, I wonder how many of last names in a paper from 1910 would be the same as those in today's paper.