Archive Digger

Answering the city desk phones and talking to readers, I learned how deeply people cared about the News-Tribune. They didn’t just like the newspaper, they thought it belonged to them. People called and wanted events publicized repeatedly; they wanted arrests left out of the “matter of record”; they wanted obituaries to be rerun adding shirttail relatives and beloved pets as survivors. When I told them no, as I often had to do, they grew frustrated. “But you’re a public service!” people told me more than once.