The Mountain Enterprise is one of three community newspapers showcased this spring in a Nieman Reports feature story, Harvard University’s international journal “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism” around the world.

This newspaper’s reporting of the multi-year battle waged by Mountain Community residents over availability of water for the proposed Frazier Park Estates in Lebec—and the TriCounty Watchdogs’ court victory over Kern County and the developer—was featured by Barbara Selvin in her story, “Local Weeklies Are Covering the Communities Big Dailies Ignore.” Selvin, who teaches journalism at Stony Brook University in New York, became interested in how The Mountain Enterprise works to develop community reporters.

Harvard’s journal asked Selvin to explore why local weekly newspapers are the top source for news about local communities, “a source that has grown in importance as regional newspapers have pulled back from covering outlying areas over the past 15 years.”

The circulation of the nation’s 7,000 community newspapers is 65.5 million readers in the United States, according to a 2010 National Newspaper Association study.

“Weeklies with a strong editorial voice bring communities together—or stir debate—over issues of great local import,” Selvin’s survey found.

Last year Selvin interviewed Patric Hedlund, editor of The Mountain Enterprise, during a campaign by The International Society for Weekly Newspaper Editors to have their work fully represented at Washington D.C.’s Newseum.

Front pages from The Mountain Enterprise are now displayed with those of major urban dailies from around the world in the Newseum, just down Pennsylvania Avenue from U.S. Congress and the White House in the nation’s capital.

In May The Mountain Enterprise will receive an award from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for excellence in editorial writing.

Selvin researched the work this newspaper contributed over 10 years to secure firefighter paramedics and a new firehouse in remote Pine Mountain Station 58, and our reports on lapses in oversight by Kern County’s engineers during the building of the Frazier Park Library that led to the loss of heritage oaks the county had promised would be preserved.

—The Mountain Enterprise staff

This is part of the April 24, 2015 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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