It's around 9:00 a.m. when newspaper publisher
Stephanie Patton heads into her office
at The Leland Progress.
It's Wednesday, that's her busy day.
Today is newspaper day.
When the paper gets delivered from the printer.
Stephanie runs the 120 year old newspaper
in Leland, Mississippi.
It's a small community in the heart
of the state's Delta region.
But today however, I'm kind of wearing
a couple of different hats so we'll be going to Arcola
for a ribbon cutting of a new boat ramp launch.
That'll be awesome.
This week's edition won't be delivered
from the printer until noon
so Stephanie needs to make good use her of day.
See, she's not just the newspaper's publisher,
she's also a reporter.
Actually, she's the reporter.
What's your staff like?
You're looking at her (laughs) right now.
I'm the editor, the publisher, the salesman, the janitor,
the mail room, the intern, the designer, and I'm it.
This is it.
She heads down to neighboring Arcola
to get the boat ramp story for next week's issue.
Locals are excited about this ramp.
It gives them easier access to enjoy Deer Creek.
Probably not.
I guess not.
Well, shame on them (laughs)
for not having stories like that.
In a day when newspapers are endangered,
The Leland Progress is thriving.
Stephanie bought the paper in 2011.
Since then, the small community newspaper has taken
a different approach to journalism than most others.
For one, you won't find any national wire stories.
You're never gonna find anything in there
about national news or world news or even not a whole lot
of state news unless Leland is somehow linked in.
You may think that in a town of 4200 people,
that Leland sees its fair share of slow news days
but if you spend any time in a small Southern town,
you know that there are few secrets and news travels fast.
How would you describe the community of Leland?
It's a great representative
of the whole Mississippi Delta
because there's a little bit of everything.
You have a wide variety of cultures
that are kind of melted together here.
Italian, Lebanese, Chinese,
it's just a little bit of everything
and there's a bunch of characters mixed in there
that makes it a lot of fun.
And that also makes it good for the newspaper business.
The Delta's known for tending to everybody's business.
(laughing)
So we like to know what's going on.
Charlotte Buchanan
is the Progress's lifestyle columnist.
She holds a position eliminated
from a lot of larger news organizations.
I write about the Delta,
I write about the people in the Delta.
The things that I know best.
Charlotte is a veteran journalist,
former elected official,
and once spurned the advances of a young Elvis Presley
before he became the king.
He offered to take her for a milkshake.
She declined.
Not cute for me.
Charlotte finds inspiration for her weekly column
from the community around her.
This week I wrote about kindness.
There was a little girl from out of town who was involved
in an accident and a man stopped and helped the mother
and the child.
And then I wrote about a little boy who's just 10 years old
and I wrote about him getting the kindness award
at his school.
These two interact
like they've known each other a lifetime.
While Charlotte's a product of the Delta, Stephanie is not.
She grew up in Louisiana and spent most of her career
working for Southern Living in Birmingham.
That's where she met her husband.
He is from Leland, Mississippi.
We decided to move closer to family
so we picked up from Birmingham,
moved to Leland not knowing what we were gonna do
but just had a lot of faith that things would work out
and I ended up buying the community newspaper.
And when she needs help sorting out a story
she's cultivated a reliable source.
I found the best hair salon here from a lady
who grew up here and she knows everybody
and everything because everybody tells her everything.
So she really helped me connect the dots
and any time I have a question I just call up Donna and say,
now what's the deal with so and so and so and so.
And she can give me all the info.
The boat ramp isn't the only story Stephanie
is covering today.
She heads for Tribbett, a small farming community
she jokingly refers to as a suburb of Leland.
This time Stephanie is on the business beat
interviewing a young local farmer.
John Mark Looney grows popcorn.
He markets his product as crop to pop and it's starting
to show up in stores across the state.
Who'd like crop to pop?
The Mississippi Delta, if you just drive through it
you think, wow, there's nothing there.
There's soybean fields on the left as far as you can see,
corn fields, or cotton fields on the right
as far as you can see.
To me that's not a lot of nothing.
To me that's a factory and they're building a product.
I guess it's all in the way you see it.
Over the past few decades, Mississippi's Delta
region has heard a lot of bad press about itself.
But The Leland Progress has become a positive mirror
for this region.
Reminding families they are not always the headlines
they read about themselves.
I would like for it to reflect back to Leland
that they're not dumb because they live in the Delta.
They're not fat
and unhealthy because they live in the Delta.
They're not unworthy of praise and accolations
and awards because they live in the Delta.
If you keep reading something, you keep hearing something,
you will tend to believe it.
Lisa Bush is Leland's vice mayor.
She and her husband Cedric grew up here.
They see how far a little good press
from a local paper can go.
She always brings out the best of Leland.
What the Delta has to offer.
And that's what I love about her.
When The Leland Progress came to us.
After lunch, this week's paper
arrives hot off the press.
On the front page is a story of a local high schooler
headed to the Ivy League.
One of our graduates got accepted to Columbia University
on a full scholarship so she made the front page of course
because that's huge and we're real proud of her.
While she likes to focus on the positive,
Stephanie does not see herself
as the town's public relations manager.
She's still a journalist and sometimes that means
covering crime or corruption
which can be especially challenging
in a city the size of Leland.
It takes a lot more guts to cover bad news stories
in a small town than it ever will take
for somebody in a big city because chances are
you're not gonna run into that person in the grocery store,
sitting next to them in church.
It's a whole lot more difficult.
It also makes me adamant about getting the facts right.
Wednesday afternoon, it's time for Stephanie
to assume the circulation role.
She hand delivers newspapers to newsstands
around the community and to an assisted living facility
a few towns over.
Stephanie doesn't want anyone to miss their paper
because they won't be able to get this news
from any other source.
There is no one else out there that's gonna cover
the local news like a local community newspaper
and that's my role is to make sure that Leland
has a voice.
Small town gossip can always be counted on
but for the folks in Leland, local journalism
will be there to set the story straight.
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