A Different View: All news is local – within 30 miles of your door!
If you were to spend the rest of your life coming up with the raison d'être for a local newspaper, you would never do better than the great John McGahern did in half a dozen sentences.
Then again, the man who is one of Ireland’s greatest ever novelists could do things with a handful of words that others would struggle to fit into a thesis – but this was as much about his philosophy as his writing.
And his love for his native place – rarely staying outside of its boundaries – wasn’t just at the core of his canon of spectacular lifetime’s work; as travelled as he was, it was also very much his world.
And with the benefit of seeing those faraway hills up close, he also knew that there was nothing there that he didn’t have much closer to home.
It wasn’t just a lifetime’s supply of unforgettable characters; it was his ability to recognise that your own corner of the planet is a microcosm of the rest of it.
Or as he put it himself:
“Though I have written only about a small area, less than thirty miles, it would nevertheless be considered enormous by the local people.
“Except for football and politics, the county divisions mean little to them. For those who live around Mohill, Rockingham – eighteen miles away – might as well be Syracuse (New York or Sicily).
It is each single, enclosed locality that matters, and everything that happens within it is of passionate interest to those who live there
“It is each single, enclosed locality that matters, and everything that happens within it is of passionate interest to those who live there. 'Do you have any news, any news?'
“But once the news crosses a certain boundary, eyes that a moment before were wild with curiosity will suddenly glaze: news no longer local is of no interest.”
Of course he was exaggerating to make his point; the madness of an American or Russian President bombing other lands has huge ramifications in every townland or hamlet.
Splendid isolation doesn’t spare you from the rising cost of oil or the spiralling rate of inflation.
But the things that matter most aren’t of global significance at all; the minors winning the first round of the football championship matters and so does the pageant that is the St Patrick’s Day Parade.
The Agricultural Show isn’t just about the best of vegetables and animals – it’s a social occasion for which many natives return home.
So, I believe, it is with local newspapers.
We won’t cover the latest atrocities in Iran or Gaza or Ukraine – but we will cover its local impact.
We won’t go there to offer a local insight, but we will talk to those driven from their homes and their homelands by despots and dictators.
Our brief is not to cover world affairs, but it is part of the equation that we look at how that affects our neighbours.
Local papers, like McGahern, are unashamedly parochial – but that doesn’t mean our world only stretches to a countywide radius.
The great Belfast poet, Gerry Dawe, also addressed the subject in own beautiful way.
Gerry had a long association with the Connacht Tribune during his early academic career at UCG, when he edited our Writing in the West page, offering a platform to new writers and poets.
So he knew what we did and why we did it.
His poem, the Tribune, once took pride of place at the entrance to our former home in Market Street. It’s still to be seen at what is now the PorterShed, except it’s now around at the side of the premises.
Ostensibly it’s about a trip as a passenger on the Connemara bus, a trip clearly taken on a Thursday evening – because his fellow cargo on the bus is several bundles of Connacht Tribunes (the country edition, before there was a Galway City Tribune).
It’s the last line that again captures a different part of the philosophy of a local paper, but it’s a short poem, beautifully written – so it’s easier to carry it all, for context and enjoyment.
In this one
I am going over a hill
the bus negotiates
with tremendous skill
The light is changing
as we pass old people
standing stock-still
The country edition’s dropped
At half-lit shops
Where we stop and wait
For a wave of the hand
News that travels is never late
And there it is; news that travels is never late.
It’s a philosophy that runs counter to world we live in – and indeed in many ways to our own approach to our profession these days.
Of course, being both first and right is best of all, but the Tribune, for well over a century, didn’t just sell because it was first. On the biggest stories, we couldn’t be first because we were only published in Thursdays and Fridays.
And there it is; news that travels is never late.
But we could reflect on what happened, preview what would happen next – and wrap it up so that it made it new when it arrived on the Connemara bus or the Dublin train.
Our world, like John McGahern’s, was local; we covered the county and strayed into the neighbouring one – and beyond that we reflected national and international events in terms of their impact on our own constituency.
Having worked for a number of years in the old Cork Examiner, I remember a philosophy there too that saw news as local and international; what happened in Cork was local and what happened anywhere else was international.
De Paper had a Dublin office, but it was kind of in the same way that the New York Times had a base in Berlin; it was important it was covered but only in how it affected things at home.
All news is local – and the entire world can be found within 30 miles of your home.