A Hometown Edge

By Kelly Carr
February 11, 2009 01:38 PM

When I was in high school I worked as a sports correspondent at my hometown newspaper, The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Most of the athletes I reported on were my age and I knew, without searching for directions, where all the high schools were located and the history of each spot. This insight gave me context and a sourcing ease that I wouldn’t appreciate until later in my career.

In the years since, I’ve landed in several newsrooms in different states, and with each move, I had to start over. I knew little about the history of the area, hadzero contacts and minimal understanding about how even the local government structure functioned. Everything had to be built from the bottom. The process was overwhelming.

Through these transitions I had always wondered: How can you develop a hometown edge in a coverage area where you are a stranger?

I recently met Dave Falchek, a business reporter at The Times-Tribune in Scranton, Pa., a rival paper to The Times Leader. Falchek has spent time in other states, reporting for various publications, but was now back home where he was raised writing business stories for an audience of former classmates, family and friends. Since we are both reporters from the Northeast Pennsylvania region, we discussed how to keep the hometown edge when away from home.

The first essential is to understand the area’s past. Research the history of the economy in your coverage area.

Falchek understands that he covers an area that at one time had an economy relying primarily on coal. Once coal went by the wayside, manufacturing sprang up everywhere. Now it’s contracting. This sort of background knowledge helps Falchek clearly understand what’s happening on his beat and give his stories a bigger-picture feel.

“By understanding the area’s history and where it’s been, you have a better understanding of the history and the culture of the area and you can put things happening now in context,” he said. “When you have that sort of context you can see the phases and the evolution.”

Falchek’s beat has one of the highest rates of nativity in the nation. This means that people who grew up in this part of Pennsylvania stay put. The fact that Falchek grew up in the area automatically gives him a certain sense of “street cred” with people he’s interviewing. But you don’t need to be from the area to get this kind of credibility. It’s all about educating yourself into a local.

You can’t understand a community if you are sitting at your desk. Make a promise of immersion to yourself. Get to know which spots the locals have frequented for years and understand the historical perspective of why they are drawn there. Get acclimated with the lingo of the area and identify the products that are special to the region. Attend some high school sports events or community gatherings to get a sense of what makes the place tick. Sign up to take classes in your personal time or eat at restaurants you normally ignore.

Falchek suggests setting up field trips to tour major employers in the area and to develop a reporting specialty – take one part of your coverage and master it.

“When you are in a particular market, your area has a specialty,” he said. “In Scranton, one of the odd things is that we have one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of bathroom partition. Every market has something like that.”

Finally, once you have become so localized, it’s important to take a step back and understand what’s been forgotten.

Have you ever noticed that when you travel back to your hometown after a few years away, you notice different places, strange nooks that you’ve never seen before? This perspective is the key to deeper coverage. What practices, traditions, businesses have become so common to the locals that they fail to realize their uniqueness? Once you find those elements, investigate what they say about your area compared to the rest of the nation.

Falchek admits that reporting is sometimes easier because residents can pin him to the area. There’s a certain amount of access this brings. But we both agree - it’s not impossible to craft a hometown sense or an insider’s knowledge. It just takes dedication to educating yourself and a sense of adventure.

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Copyright © 2009 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism