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Big Stories from Small Towns
University of Nebraska Press
July 2011
On Sale: July 1, 2011
264 pages ISBN: 0803230168 EAN: 9780803230163 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
At a time when mainstream news media are hemorrhaging and
doomsayers are predicting the death of journalism, take
heart: the First Amendment is alive and well in small towns
across America. In Emus Loose in Egnar, award-winning
journalist Judy Muller takes the reader on a grassroots tour
of rural American newspapers, from an Indian reservation in
Montana to the Alaska tundra to Martha’s Vineyard, and
discovers that many weeklies are not just surviving, but
thriving.
In these small towns, stories can range from club news to
Klan news, from broken treaties to broken hearts, from
banned books to escaped emus; they document the births,
deaths, crimes, sports, and local shenanigans that might
seem to matter only to those who live there. And yet, as
this book shows us, these “little” stories create a mosaic
of American life that tells us a great deal about who we
are—what moves us, angers us, amuses us.
Filled with characters both quirky and courageous, the book
is a heartening reminder that there is a different kind of
“bottom line” in the hearts of journalists who keep churning
out good stories, week after week, for the corniest of
reasons: that our freedoms depend on it. Not that they would
put it that way, necessarily. In the words of one editor in
Colorado, “If we found a political official misusing
taxpayer funds, we wouldn’t hesitate to nail him to a stump.”
No awards found for this book.
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