NPR Went to Council Grove. They Did Not Talk to the Readers.

Cedar Valley News
May 5, 2026
NPR Went to Council Grove.
They Did Not Talk to the Readers.
By George Khan

The story aired on April nineteenth. NPR sent a reporter to a town of 2,200 people in Kansas. He spent the day with the publisher of the local newspaper. He came home with a story about a small-town daily, in print since 1872. I listened to it twice. The second time, I noticed something I had missed.

He did not interview a single resident of Council Grove.

The publisher’s name is Jan Sciacca. She bought The Council Grove Republican in 2021 because the only people interested in buying it were not from Council Grove. Somebody had to do something, she told the reporter. She is the publisher, the reporter, the photographer, and the sales manager. She has two full-time employees, Christy Jimerson and Kay Roberts. She spends $2,500 a month on postage and $3,000 a month on printing. Local subscribers pay $11 a month. She stays up late at her kitchen table writing stories for the next morning’s edition.

NPR brought back her costs and her hours. NPR brought back a researcher at Northwestern who said that almost 40% of American local newspapers have closed since 2005.

Now read the list again of who was on tape in the piece. The publisher. The city clerk swearing in new council members. A Northwestern professor in Evanston, Illinois.

Nobody from Council Grove.

I do not say this to criticize the reporter. He did his job. He went to a place. He found the protagonist. He brought back her voice, and her costs, and her hours. Reporting can do as much. What reporting cannot do, at least the reporting we have built our broadcast machine to do, is point its microphone at the seventy-eight-year-old woman who picks up the paper at the news rack on Main Street because the obituary will tell her who needs a casserole this week. It cannot ask the high schooler whose name was in the paper for making the honor roll how his grandmother clipped it and put it on her refrigerator. It cannot find the man who voted for the businessman in the mayor’s race decided by one ballot, and ask him whether he would have known how it turned out if the Republican had not been there to count the votes the way Jan counts everything else.

Those are the people Jan Sciacca is staying up late for. They were standing right there. The cameras could not point at them.

The country the cameras can reach is the country of protagonists. Publishers. Mayors. Senators. Researchers at universities who can explain the numbers. The country I am living in is a different one. The country I am living in is held up at the level the cameras cannot find — at the level of the woman picking up the paper, the neighbor taking the casserole, the customer who walks into my deli and asks how my mother is doing. None of those people will be on the news tonight. They are not protagonists. They are the country.

Two and a half weeks ago, NPR told us that a local newspaper in a town of 2,200 people is still alive. They told us about the one person keeping it alive. They did not tell us about the twenty-two hundred who decided it was worth keeping. Those readers are why Jan does what she does. They are not in the broadcast.

I have a paper taped to my front window. Cedar Valley News. I have a publisher I read every day, an editor I know, columnists I share a town with. None of those names matters to the argument. The argument is plain. Somebody, in this town and in yours, decided this paper was worth the effort. The reader who picked it up off the rack outside the post office decided the same thing. So did the reader who clipped a sentence from it last week and put it on the refrigerator. Those decisions are the ones the cameras cannot find their way to. They are the ones the country is made of.

Jan Sciacca is one person. She bought the paper four years ago because nobody else was going to. There may not be a fifth interested party four years from now. The country whose news is kept alive by people deciding it is worth the effort is a country one heart attack away from a news desert.

The bulletin board outside the post office is still full this morning. The Cedar Valley News is still taped to my window. The casserole still goes down the street to the family who needs it. Somebody, somewhere, is paying the postage on all of it.

The cameras cannot see them. I can. So can you.

Walk to the deli and tell me I am wrong.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about the Jan Sciaccas in your own town, the ones the cameras cannot find. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Jan Sciacca, Christy Jimerson, Kay Roberts, The Council Grove Republican, and the events at NPR are real.

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