Jim Kenyon on Talbot's vs. Kohl's vs. Wal-Mart

To the Local Daily Newspaper:

I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of your coverage of public affairs in the Town of Norwich.

I grudingly concede it is within your rights to mine the town list-serve that Valley Net administers for news and quotes, however well-calculated that practice is to chill open and lively discussion in that forum. I admit that if I ran a daily newspaper that must struggle to survive in an industry that is on the brink of technology-induced oblivion, I too might resort to this free source of ready news as an alternative to the expensive, old-fashioned gumshoe kind of reporting.

But after reading today's Jim Kenyon column about the missing welcome sign, I can only assume the Local Daily Newspaper (LDN) has settled on a strategy of wilfully ignoring what ought to be obvious: A list-serve like the one Mr. Kenyon quotes at length offers too small and self-selected a sample of personal sentiments to be anything like representative of actual public opinion in a municipality of 3,500 people. More importantly, if your assumption is that Norwich is comprised largely of folks with too much time on their hands, what better way to make this hypothesis self-fulfilling than to seek evidence on a town list-serve -- since such a forum by definition attracts people with the time and energy to pound recreationally on their keyboards?

Moreover, even assuming one can rightly draw any inferences about the town in general from the list-serve posts, Mr. Kenyon actually ignores the evidence and perpetuates his own Ahab-like obsession about his home town by concluding that "image is everything in Norwich." I've read the same posts he has, and offer the following evidence-based, alternative conclusion: List-serve participants in Norwich, regardless of their feelings about the sign and its provenance, rightly think that theft of public property is wrong. That's true regardless of whether the thieves were motivated by thoughtless malevolence, a desire to exploit the secondary market for municipal welcome signs, or a wish to engage in social commentary with respect to self-absorbed, self-conscious quaintness in a time of general economic turmoil.

Since Jim Kenyon fancies himself such a staunch righter of social wrongs, he ought to devote himself to solving what he derisively calls "this classic who-dun-it" instead of making fun of people who improvidently refer to their neighbors as shopping at Talbot's instead of Kohl's. "Kohl's?," asks Kenyon. "What about Wal-Mart?" Well, what about the Listen Center? As I write, I am wearing a shirt I bought there a week or so ago for less than $4. And I am a law professor, married to a doctor, with a new Prius on order.

In fairness to Jim Kenyon, he is not the only writer at the LDN who is determined to perpetuate the concept of Norwich as a wealth-besotted teapot-tempestville regardless what evidence supports or refutes this theory. Susan Boutwell did the same thing on July 24. Here's the gratuitious lede from her front-page story: "It's been a quiet few weeks in town: The long-debated bandstand has been built on the Norwich Green, a bicycle lane in the works for a decade is now in use and the last few Selectboard meetings have taken place without a fight. So Norwich officials were pretty unhappy to report yesterday that a handmade sign welcoming visitors to their village had been stolen."

The LDN might have abandoned that angle, for once, and reported that this year only five tax valuation appeals were made to the Board of Civil Authority (which, by way of full disclosure, I chair), as opposed to the 31 appeals from last year. Since real estate values in Norwich do not appear to have been declining, what accounts for this apparent uptick in general satisfaction with the work of the Board of Listers? Might this be good news? I am not the first person to point out that good news is not considered conducive to newstand sales.

I am also not the first to wonder why the LDN, in its quest to limn the outrageous excesses that wealth induces, is obsessed with Norwich while ignoring Hanover. According to the most recent U.S. census, Norwich (population 3,544) had a measly 14 families below the government's official poverty level. Hanover (population 10,850) had just TEN such families! If the newspaper is scrounging around for evidence of rich people who have nothing better to do than advance their storybook image of quaint New England villages, forget cute welcome signs for a minute and take a look at how Hanoverians have ridiculed and derided Dartmouth's upcoming Visual Arts Center on Lebanon Street, designed by one of the nation's best architectural firms but a building that is not calcuated to look as if it was conjured up 200 years ago. At least wealthy folks in Norwich (many, many of whom owe their wealth to certain green-colored institutions in nearby New Hampshire) have the public spiritedness to settle in a state that is willing to tax itself responsibly so as to provide the public services that the unlucky among us ought to receive from their communities.

I considered but rejected the idea of expressing these concerns in a letter to the editor of the LDN. Doing that would mean playing the game by the LDN's rules: arbitrary word limits, editing by some of the very people being criticized, publication at a time and with a prominence of the editors' choosing. The very web-based channels of communication that are driving daily newspapers to extinction empower us to stop playing by the LDN's rules, and now that we live amidst newspaper monoculture (given the recent folding of the Connecticut Valley Spectator and its affiliated publications) I am more and more inclined to do so.

Readers of the world -- or of the Upper Valley -- unite! Just as Senate Democrats are, at this very moment, looking to consumer-owned cooperatives as a big part of solving the healthcare crisis, reader-owned and cooperatively organized journalism organizations (whether distributed electronically or, less likely, on paper) are a compelling answer. If we owned the LDN, we could fire Jim Kenyon and replace him with someone who is able to get beyond his personal obsessions and his odd dislike of the town in which he lives. There is a wealth of unreported but real news in places like Norwich, Hanover and surrounding communities -- information that would empower us and reinvigorate our democracy, some of it inspiring, some of it embarassing, a bit of it likely to enrage us. It looks like we will have to find that news ourselves, either directly or, better yet, by employing dedicated professional writer-seekers to gather it for us.