Michael Perelman wrote:
>
> Weren't there a sizable number of small town progressive papers in the
> past? Not the majority, of course.
>
>
I can remember "small town" newspapers from Benton Harbor, St. Joseph, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, & Marcellus Michigan & from South Bend Indiana. All reactionary. A century or so ago there was a small town progressive newspaper someplace in Kansas, I don't remember the town. Again I cite Upton Sinclair, _The Brass Check_, for a pretty good account of "the media" as they existed circa 1900.
The Bloomington Pantagraph was progressive during the Civil War, advocating that one Confederate pow be shot for every black union soldier the confederates shot. (Lincoln's campaign manager, David Davis, came from Bloomington, his descendants, along with the Stevensons, later owned the paper -- and Davis was probably one of the movers-and-shakers in making the Republican party a conservative party within a decade or two. The last local owner, David Merwin, was related to both the Davis's and the Stevensons. His last act as owner was to defeat a union by speaking of the great advantages of personal relations between owner & staff. It later turned out that he had already planned to sell it to the owner of the SF Chronicle, who wanted it as a wedding present for his nephew or something like that.)
Carrol