Many years ago, I attended classes with journalism professor Charles Rankin, who called wedding information, births, deaths, meeting announcements, engagements, calendar of events, business openings, other so-called “soft news,” and the bits and pieces we gather every week “refrigerator journalism.”

“When you go into someone’s house and start looking around, often times you will see this stuff under magnets and tape all over the refrigerator,” he said by way of explanation. “That is refrigerator journalism.”

Rankin, a former government reporter for the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, knew the value of such reportage, despite his charge to try and teach us to be the next Robert Woodward or Carl Bernstein. He also knew that, to many people for whom we would be serving as readers, viewers and consumers of local news, “refrigerator journalism” would be more important than unseating a president with anonymous sources.

Localism key

Why? To paraphrase Tip O’Neil, all news is local.

News, to be relevant, must have an effect on the consumers of such news and their lives.

Rankin had all kinds of good ideas that were designed to impress this point upon all of us “green-as-grass” reporters. Things like automatically failing us on an assignment if we misspelled someone’s name, or making us walk around a single city block to come up with at least five story ideas and then sit down and write two of them.

Naturally, at the time, we thought we should be working on the tools, strategies and tactics that might enable us to bring down a president, a senator, or at least a city councilman. But in retrospect, I think a lot of us are just as thankful Rankin was able to illustrate to us the importance of all those engagement announcements, wedding information, cats in trees, births, deaths, meeting announcements, calendar of events, business openings and other stuff.

Appreciation

We came to appreciate local news. And we were very proud when our readers wallpapered their refrigerators.

But today, clip collection is changing as fast as Kodak’s and Fuji’s scramble to embrace digital photography. Instead of a shoebox full of old 5-by-7-inch prints, consumers now keep a CD or a flash memory stick of their trip to Alaska on it.  

It can’t be that far to the point where consumers will ultimately store a searchable PDF file of Grandma’s funeral notice as it ran on page 2 of the weekly gazette.

At the same time, companies such as ColorMax and AcraSearch of Paynseville, Minn., are developing ways of getting all those bound volumes out of the morgue an into a digital archive. After all, insurance companies, medical concerns and legal firms have been heading that way for years. And now Google is working on several projects to digitize the best libraries in the world.

New archiving

Here in Colorado, the Colorado Press Association has announced plans to partner with ColorMax and begin offering digital archiving, clipping service and a public notices Web site for member newspapers beginning June 1.

Steve Miller and Cal Sixta of ColorMax helped CPA staffers set up a studio at the association’s Denver location and then began training CPA staff to go completely digital.

CPA plans to digitally archive all pages of member papers on a “go forward” basis and store them as searchable PDF files.

Newspapers’ scanned pages will appear on ColorMax’s Web site and member newspapers, the association and ColorMax will have mechanisms to charge others to access that information, said CPA Executive Director Ed Otte.

Own use

Member papers are also expected to use the online archive for their own use in the newsroom and elsewhere.

“A reporter or editor or newsroom librarian won’t have to dig through files or sit at a microfilm machine to locate stories for background information for news stories, obits or historical features,” said Otte in a recent edition of Colorado Editor, CPA’s monthly publication.

But local news and the little stuff is still just as important as it ever was. Our readers may still choose to run out a copy of a PDF file of Aunt Bessy’s wedding to place on their refrigerators for all to see but the least we can do is to provide them the opportunity to store it on their hard drive, CD, flash memory, or iPod as well. “Refrigerator journalism” still lives - but maybe not on the refrigerator anymore.

Rob Carrigan specializes in prepress systems for weekly newspapers. He is the publisher of the Ute Pass Courier in Woodland Park, the Gold Rush in Cripple Creek and the Extra in Teller County, all ASP Westward LP weeklies in Colorado. He can be reached by e-mail at RCarrigan@aol.com or rcarrigan@ccnewspapers.com.