Showerthought: I called the local news a waste of time until they ran my HOA story

I used to think community newspapers were just ads and fluff. But last month the Lakewood Sentinel picked up my complaint about the HOA board voting on a $12k landscaping contract without telling anyone. Three days later the board canceled the contract and started open meetings. Has anyone else had a local paper actually get results after a ban or silence?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_beth22d ago

That bit about the Lakewood Sentinel really hit home with me. I live over in Parma Heights and had a similar thing happen with our weekly paper, the Parma Post. I wrote to them about the village council voting to sell a piece of public park land to a developer without any public hearing. They ran a front-page story and a follow-up editorial. Within a week, the council held a special meeting to reverse the vote. It just proves these small papers still carry some weight if you give them a good story.

abbyc3321d ago

lol "still carry some weight" is right. I think theres a bigger angle here nobody's talking about though. These small papers are basically the last check on local government corruption because nobody else is watching. The big city papers dont care about a park sale in Parma Heights and the TV news wont touch it unless somebody gets shot there. So when you give a tip to the Parma Post or the Lakewood Sentinel, youre literally the only journalist within 50 miles who will even look at the public records. Its wild how much power that gives regular people if they just take five minutes to send an email.