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Lindsborg News Record is circling the bowl.

Years of poor reportage, ignoring both interesting and important stories in favor of running press releases - policies that aren't explained to readers and advertizers, nor enforced evenly (the big one is "Buy an ad get coverage of your event") - and a generally aging readership of American newspapers mean that the Lindsborg News Record has a limited future in the best of circumstances. With the current owner alienating readership, the demise is being hastened.

The problem for Lindsborg is that it has no other news outlet.

I don't have the capital, but replacing the LNR with a mildly progressive and genuinely multi-media news outlet for Lindsborg could be a retirement project for me, just as Hemslojd was for Ken Sjogren. I'd envision it as primarily a web based product - with video, and maybe web radio connected.

How would we pay for it? Who would report? Who'd advertise and how would we establish rates?

I don't know. I just know that Lindsborg News Record is circling the bowl and the town needs something else in place before the vortex sends our poor little paper to the treatment plant.

The Lindsborg News Record

Yesterday's LNR included an egregious slam on the College's press office, and a nostalgic hyllning of the college's two former press officers.

The slam, in Marty Hardy's gossip column, was egregious because it was based on ignorance. Marty defended the paper's lack of coverage of President Leonard's arrival at the college. The college was responsible for the lack of coverage, Hardy maintained, because the college hadn't gotten news of the new president to the local paper of record until the Monday prior to the event. Why, back in the old days, when the college was really linked into the town, this wouldn't have happened. And, Hardy further implied, the new President should get rid of the dunderheads who failed to let the Lindsborg News Record know of this event in time to meet the paper's schedule.

What's egregious about this slam is the ignorance. There's no indication that Hardy even attempted to do what an actual reporter does - check facts before writing the story.

If the announcement of the new President was embargoed until Monday by the Board and the President, for example, then the press office is not responsible for the timing of the story. If the press officer was simply swamped by other demands, then the late announcement, while still the college press office's responsibility, is at least understandable.

And what happened to reporting on the event? What prevents the newspaper, which surely knew an announcement was imminent, from doing the job reporters have always done and going to get the story rather than waiting for the press release?

With the rise of citizen journalism, and the Lindsborg News Record's policy of only printing the news that's paid for, the LNR runs the danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant to the younger generation - people who get more of their news from the web and less of their news from print.