This is home

As I have slowly transitioned out of school and into my full-time job (which, by the way, is fantastic), now and again people have asked me, "Now, when are you going home?"

They mean back to Sparta, and I've had to come to terms with the idea that I'm not going home.

At least not in the way I have in the past.

There is no more going home for several weeks over the summer. "My bedroom" is much more of a guest room now, where I stay when I happen to be home.

There's an awful, depressing finality to the thought "I will never go home again."

But that's only because that's thinking about it wrong.

The most popular home cliche says Home is where the heart is.

Well, that thought's a lot more cheerful, because that means I have many homes. I have left a piece of my heart in many different places.

I am at home in Auburn.

I also have a home in Selma, even though I was only there for 10 weeks.

I was in London even less time than I was in Selma, but I still feel that it's my home too.

Of course I have a home in Moulton. That's where my second family lives.

Best of all, I'll always have a home in Sparta, Tenn. Even if I never get to go back for a summer, Sparta is home. People I love are there, and that means a big piece of my heart is still there.

And I also have a new home in Alex City, where my new job is. So the truth is, I get to go home almost everywhere I go. I don't have just one home, because home is where your heart is.

"Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in." ~Robert Frost

One of my absolute all time favorite songs is about home. I usually turn to it as I roll off Highway 111 on my way to my Sparta home. Switchfoot says

"Oh, this is home. Now I'm finally where I belong, where I belong. Yeah, this is home. I been searching for a place of my own, and now I've found it. Maybe this is home. Yeah, this is home. 

And now, after all my searching, after all my questions, I'm gonna call it home. I got a brand new mindset, I can finally see the sunset. I'm gonna call it home."

#lovemyjob

I received this email from my boss. This essay was written in response to a question about the future of community journalism. THIS is how I feel. This is why I love what I do.

By Dolph Tillotson

I think we should shut our ears to the buzz of distraction and focus on what we do best -- tell stories, engage readers, help to build communities.

Smaller newspapers like their big-city brothers are struggling with change. In fact, I think anyone in business these days is facing the same struggle. Name a business that is not struggling in 2012 to cope with the pace of change. I can't think of one.

However, it's also true that community newspapers face a different and somewhat less daunting set of challenges than metro papers do. 

Our enterprises are smaller and more manageable. Likewise, our cost bases are smaller and more manageable. In addition, our markets are smaller, better defined and much easier to serve.

These days, the name of the game in the news business – at least as it is practiced outside of Washington, D.C., and New York – is to be focused locally. The cliché of the month in our industry is "hyper local." Interestingly, community newspapers have always been hyper local, something metro papers apparently are just discovering.

There's a practical reason for that. It is much easier to deliver a clearly identifiable and highly localized package of information tailored to the needs of readers in, say, Nacogdoches, Texas, than to do the same thing in Houston.

Consequently, most of our 15 community newspapers still operate at profit margins that would be enviable in other businesses. Those margins may be less than they were five years ago, but they're still respectable enough to attract investors and buyers for community newspaper companies. Actually, our company is forecasting in the year ahead that our business overall will be a little better than this year, and that's encouraging.

Having said that let me also say emphatically that small-town newspapers face their own challenges. The last thing anyone in our business should do is to become complacent. 

We should be working every day to deliver more local news and commentary across more different media platforms to more and more readers. We should strive every day to tell stories more completely and more compellingly about the communities we serve than anyone else can. We should fight – and I use the word “fight” deliberately – to inform, engage and even inspire readers as never before. 

Sometimes, it seems to me that our industry has lost focus. Our publishers and editors have been pummeled by the rapid pace of technological change, by the media's fixation on Internet competition, by the advent of mobile phone and iPad apps and by the ongoing debate over whether or not to charge for Internet access to our products.

With those hornets buzzing in our ears, it's too easy to lose sight of the fact that our job is much the same as it has always been. 

The media platforms may change, but we are essentially storytellers. 

That mission – telling stories – is a function that is basic to the human condition, and it has been since our ancestors gathered around campfires in the days before writing. It's still basic, and it's still vital. Community newspapers are the one medium in the world that can give small towns focus and a forum, a careful and caring focal point for discussion of the crucial issues all communities face.

Certainly it is our challenge to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. No doubt about it. However, it may be an even more important challenge to fight the distractions and stay focused on job No. 1, which is to tell stories more completely and in more compelling ways.

Our company owns 15 community newspapers from Georgia to Del Rio, Texas. Yesterday, more people read the content we generate, in print and on the Internet, than ever before in this history of those 15 newspapers. Even more will read what we write tomorrow. That story is the wonderful news about community newspapers that no one seems to be telling, and we should be shouting it every day.

We should not retreat, as some in our industry seem intent upon doing. We should take a collective deep breath and fight back with all our heart and energy -- fight back against complacency and boring stories told boringly.

We should focus on being the beating heart of each community we serve. We must be the lifeblood of the dialogue and progress in each community. We have to be not just competent but passionate about the job before us.

I think community newspapers have the chance to thrive for many decades to come. The chance. The opportunity.

Whether community newspapers seize that opportunity depends on how well those newspapers are run, how vital they are. I can’t wait to see how that story turns out.

Dolph Tillotson is the former publisher of The Galveston County Daily News in Galveston, Texas, and a former president of SNPA.  He can be reached at dolph.tillotson@galvnews.com

Comin' Clean

It started when I wanted to vacuum my car out before my first day of work. It's needed it for a while, and I just wanted to try to get all my ducks in a row.

I figured the car wash at the gas station where I was going to fill up my tank would have one of those big vacuuming machines.

No such luck, but fortunately our apartment complex had a couple. Unfortunately, I burned a dollar discovering neither of them worked.

After trying out the Grub Mart (neither of which vacuums worked) and the three-minute express car wash (which was closed on Sundays), I finally bit the bullet. I paid $7 to the Goo Goo Car Wash for unlimited washing and vacuuming.

I really had no intention to wash my car today, although it certainly needed it. But I wasn't about to pay $7 for just vacuuming, no matter how unlimited it was.

I've never washed my car before, myself. So it was sure to be an adventure. Thankfully the wash station had simple, straightforward directions to getting your car squeaky clean.

I've gotta say ... there's something strangely satisfying about washing a car. I pre-rinsed, I sudsed, I foam brushed, I power rinsed. It was fantastic. I probably could have done a better job, but I felt pretty good about it. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that after vacuuming out the entire car, I decided to go wash it again.

Hey, it was unlimited.

So I probably didn't know the best job ever, but I'm fairly certain the car was cleaner than I was by the time it was all over—chalk it up to the wind blowing the sudsy foam back in my face or the humidity making me nearly as wet as the sprayer was making the car.

But I got it done. And I'm fairly sure I did better than these guys:

Have a happy week!