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IN THE 16 YEARS THAT ARLENA MCLAUGHLIN WORKED HER WAY UP FROM advertising sales representative to publisher, the Huntsville Item, a 6,100-circulation east Texas daily, had four different owners. When she arrived in 1980 it was held by Harte-Hanks. In 1986 MediaNews Group bought the Item, then turned around two years later and sold it to Thomson Newspapers. In 1995 it was sold again, to Hollinger International.
As publisher, McLaughlin became accustomed to showing the paper to prospective buyers. "I'd give them the market tour," she says, "and talk about our marketing plans. And business plans. And talk about the community, the stability of the employees and that sort of thing.
Some days you would almost feel more like a real estate broker than you would a newspaper publisher."
Had she hung around, McLaughlin might still be entertaining buyers. Last year the Item was peddled a fifth time, to the fastestgrowing chain in the country, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., of Birmingham, Alabama. But in 1996 McLaughlin, 42, took a new job as publisher of the Courier (circulation 12,000) in Conroe, Texas, and several weeklies on the northern outskirts of Houston.
Two years later, that paper got new owners.
America's hometown papers are a precious national resource. They render up on a daily basis the events that matter most to their readers: births, retirements and deaths, school plays and football plays, sewer excavations and pothole repairs, drunk driving arrests and, these days, even the addresses of the sex offenders among us. If the papers sometimes sidestep controversy-best look for that in the popular letters to the editor columns-they cover the staples: school boards, zoning boards, town councils.
These newspapers are indispensable in another way, as local citizens, heading up annual United Way drives, championing local business, and generally lending their communities a sense of stability in an unstable world. With fully half of the nation's 1,489 daily papers under 13,000 circulation, they help form the backbone of an America seldom featured in glossy magazines or on the evening news. But deeply rooted as they may be, the nation's hometown papers are vulnerable to outside forces. And these days, they are changing hands like used cars at an auction-more than 380 in the past five years alone.