The talented and intrepid reporter Dave Hoekstra, a former 30-year writer with the Chicago Sun-Times, spent the better part of three years chronicling the struggle of independent newspapers like my family’s to survive amid a perfect storm of challenges and attacks that have shuttered thousands of locally owned papers or forced them to sell to chains with scavenger instincts that diminished once-vital community organs into ghosts of their former beings.
With penetrating questions, passion and empathy, a ready pen, and a trained observer’s eye for details we miss about ourselves, Hoekstra traveled the nation — from Charleston, South Carolina, to Bakersfield, California, with stops in the Midwest, where he gave great care and interest to my family’s newspaper – the Carroll (Iowa) Times Herald — and its daily pursuit of survival through reinvention and relentless optimism.
The result is an inspiring book that officially released Oct. 11. The title: “Beacons in the Darkness: Hope And Transformation Among America’s Community Newspapers.”
