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The news about Afghanistan and Iraq can feel like background noise, as listeners and readers become desensitized to the long, ongoing conflicts. How do local newspaper editors balance their duty to report on very important issues vs. losing your attention, with stories day after day on the same topic? The World’s Jason Margolis visited Mississippi and asked editors at three local papers. (Photos: Jason Margolis)

Brian Hawkins, editor, Starkville Daily News

Ronnie Agnew, executive editor, The Clarion Ledger

Jesse Bass and Meryl Dakin, editors, The Student Printz Newspaper of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg

• Starkville Daily News
• The Clarion Ledger
• Student Printz

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MARCO WERMAN: Newspaper coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has risen and fallen. Lately it’s fallen. For one thing stories about the wars which have lasted six and eight years respectively might be sounding a bit repetitive by now. For another, even newspaper giants like the New York Times face financial constraints on their foreign coverage. So you can imagine how difficult it might be for smaller papers to provide adequate reporting on the wars. The World’s Jason Margolis visited Mississippi and met with editors of three local papers.

JASON MARGOLIS: The Clarion Ledger is Mississippi’s largest newspaper. Its circulation is 85,000. Executive editor, Ronnie Agnew, says his goal is to not let the wars be forgotten.

RONNIE AGNEW: Mississippi has a very heavy presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And so initially yeah we start off being aggressive and trying to cover our folks, their families and such but as you know as time has gone on it’s become quite difficult.

MARGOLIS: That’s partly a matter of resources. The Clarion Ledger is a small paper with a shrinking budget. Also the wars just aren’t front page news in Mississippi.

AGNEW: When you’ve got soldiers being killed by roadside bombs almost on a daily basis those stories initially years ago made page one. Now they’re inside. So now it’s to the point now where if it’s involving a local unit or if it’s a major, major catastrophe – I hate to say that but that’s the reality of it. That’s when we know we have a big story.

MARGOLIS: All the editors I met with in Mississippi say they worry about reader fatigue. Nobody expressed this concern more strongly than Jessie Bass. He’s the editor and chief of The Students Prints, the University of Southern Mississippi’s Campus newspaper. He says he’d like to run more stories about Iraq and Afghanistan but he puts his head in his hands and says what’s the point?

JESSIE BASS: It’s kind of useless to run something that nobody’s going to read you know. I might as well write it on a piece of paper and put it in the ceiling.

MARGOLIS: That doesn’t mean the student editors have entirely given up. Co-editor Meryl Daken says The Student Prints does find some angles that hit home with students.

MERYL DAKEN: We do have a ROTC presence an ROTC presence on campus and we’ve run things about them in the past. Like we just did a story on their training camp they had at Camp Shelby. So that’s an angel that we like to look at is how the students are involved with it. And if you get politics involved that’s always something to look for. There’s political groups on campus that have their own take on it and we can go to those students and talk to them about it. And whenever we do interview a lot of students or have a lot of student interaction it’s more readable.

MARGOLIS: That’s the magic formula – localizing the conflicts. That also works well for a paper about 200 miles north of the University of Southern Mississippi. Brian Hawkings is the editor of the Starkville Daily News.

BRIAN HAWKINGS: We are a small town community newspaper. We have about 3500 subscribers and we cover the home town news. That’s what we’re here for.

MARGOLIS: Hawkings was speaking over breakfast at a local diner on Main Street where everybody seems to know everybody. One hundred and sixty five people from the Starkville unit of the Mississippi National Guard are deployed in Iraq. I asked Hawkings how often his readers think about the wars.

HAWKINGS: Heavily right now. When you have a unit that’s deployed it’s on everybody’s mind.

MARGOLIS: Hawkings says the national TV news has become jaded. He says war stories in his paper aren’t about faceless soldiers and statistics. For example, Starkville lost its second soldier in a suicide attack last year.

HAWKINGS: That brought it home again. I mean a lot of people thought the violence in Iraq had ended and then we have one of our own, the second soldier we’ve had in this community that was killed. You know so you know I think when it involves local people it tends to bring it home and remind people that it’s still happening.

MARGOLIS: Of course it’s easier to personalize stories in small communities. But that doesn’t excuse big city papers from covering the wars in a compelling way. Ronnie Agnew of Jackson’s Clarion Ledger says he tries but admits he doesn’t always succeed.

AGNEW: It’s kind of a failing on my part that we haven’t pushed that issue and that’s something I need to push because I think it’s important. I mean Mississippi’s presence is huge in these wars and there are a lot of families that are hurting. There are a lot of families here who have had multiple deployments and their finances are being wracked and their lives are being uprooted and they don’t see the end. And I think they’re looking for us and they’re looking to us to help them at least to understand the whys.

MARGOLIS: For The World I’m Jason Margolis, Jackson, Mississippi.

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