Yellow Springs: A community haven in the local news firestorm

The award-winning News serves up everything from government meetings to community life

By Maggie Fipps

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio  – The village of Yellow Springs is home to 3,718 people, but you wouldn’t know it by walking through the vibrant downtown.

Walk down Xenia Avenue, and you pass the baby-blue Sunrise Cafe. The Little Art Theatre juts its small marquee into the main street a little farther down. Across the street, Tom’s Market sells groceries out of the same brick building it’s been in for 50 years.

Tucked behind the storefronts of downtown Yellow Springs at 253 ½ Xenia Avenue, the Yellow Springs News continues to print a newspaper twice a week. Since 2006, they have won “Best Newspaper in its Size Class” 16 times. Although editors, strategies, and owners have come and gone, the print product has stayed the same since 1880. In a backroom, old volumes of the paper are tucked into filing cabinets.

“If I pulled out one of those volumes, you can open it up and functionally…the design is a lot different, and things are placed in different ways, but you’ll see a lot of the same,” said Lauren “Chuck” Shows, the editor at the paper.

Although it may seem that way, Yellow Springs is not an untouched time capsule of the past. Antioch University, which started in 1852 as a groundbreaking liberal arts school, closed in 2008 after peaking at around 2,000 students in the 1960s. Several businesses from Antioch alumni, like Vernay Labs and Antioch Publishing, have shuttered in the past 10 years.

This shift made tourism Yellow Springs’ main interest and forced many residents to work outside the town. Although their jobs are in Dayton or Beavercreek, their hearts are in their community.

 “People care a lot about anything that changes in town,” Shows said. “People care a lot about contributing to causes that they care about and upholding institutions that they care about.”

One of those institutions is the newspaper. Under the masthead, original articles by Shows and reporter Reilly Dixon speak on local issues. School board meetings and building projects, the standard fare of the newspaper business, dominate the coverage. But open to the second, third and fourth pages, and you hear from community voices.

Inside, inches and inches of space are dedicated to community happenings: art galleries and workout classes and church meetings and book clubs. This is the minutia of community life, what makes Yellow Springs work. Shows said this content is provided by community members.

With their small staff, Shows and Dixon, couldn’t possibly cover all of these events in detail. But having an open conversation between the community and the newspaper allows the events to get the publicity they need.

“It’s almost like an ouroboros, as long as the paper exists to tell people what happened at the meetings, people remain interested in them, and as long as they remain interested, we will keep writing about them,” Shows said, demonstrating her point with making a circular motion with her hands.

An ouroboros is an ancient symbol from Egyptian iconography depicting a dragon or serpent eating its own tail. It is meant to represent the cyclical nature of life, but recently, local newspapers seem to simply consume themselves in debt and closures.

Shows says this is due to a lack of journalistic literacy. As people become their own truth tellers on Facebook or Instagram, they feel informed without having the backbone of journalistic ethics.

“I think that people don’t have a general understanding of the difference between if your neighbor goes on a community page and makes claims,” Shows said. “Nobody’s vetted those claims. You can’t just believe what your neighbor says, and that sucks because we should be able to believe our neighbors.”

The Yellow Springs News tries to provide a better forum for public discourse on its letters page. Shows said this is an active place to share their ideas and present problems or solutions to other readers.

“People are in dialogue with each other, and sometimes letters literally go back and forth a little bit,” Shows said. “Somebody might disagree with this letter in this week’s paper in the next week, or they might really agree with it and want to add to it.”

But why print the newspaper? Why not let the wolves tear themselves apart in the comment section of a Facebook post? Shows and Dixon said that print is their “bread and butter.”

“There’s something about opinion writing or op-ed writing…putting it on a printed page gives it more heft,” Dixon said. “We were talking just a week or two ago: ‘Do we want to continue to be on Facebook?’ This is a very clearly deteriorating social media platform. We see our neighbors sharing misinformation regularly. Is it incumbent upon us to stoop to that level?”

Every research paper, doom report, or evaluation of local news is shouting “digital first” like the newsboys of old sold papers. Desperately trying to cater to the younger generations, newspapers are flocking to short-form video or putting their digital content behind a paywall.

However, in Yellow Springs, Shows and Dixon know their audience.

“Our digital presence is secondary, but people read us because we’re a newspaper, not because we’re a media organization,” Dixon said.

Shows described downtown Yellow Springs as a living, breathing organism that still had vestiges of the past. Walk into the local grocery store, and you can pick up the News on the stand. The coffee shop carries copies, too, just like the 1900s never ended.

These businesses also carry ads in the newspaper, feeding back into that self-sustaining ecosystem of the village. But that may not last forever.

“We’re all organs in the same body, and if one organ fails, they’re all going to start failing,” Shows said. “If our grocery store fails, I think it means we’re at the beginning of the failure of downtown in a way. … It’s not an inevitability, but it almost feels like one sometimes. This is not the way the world works anymore.”

It almost feels as if the Yellow Springs News is sheltered from the fraught world of local news, the doom and gloom statistics and the SEO-driven digital content with slow websites to match. Shows and Dixon faithfully show up to cover their community, incorporate their feedback, and compose a paper.

That little blue office at 253 ½ Xenia Avenue is a shelter in the storm.

“There is something intentional about the choices people are making to preserve what they consider to be the heart and soul, or the identity of Yellow Springs,” Shows said. “And the Yellow Springs News is part of that for now.”