Cristine Knapp Yennard did not become a journalist for the loftiest of reasons.
Not to save the world, not to uncover scandal, not to preserve truth, justice or the American way did she become managing editor of the Hamilton County News 3 1/2 years ago. As Yennard tells it, she took over this small weekly newspaper in the Adirondacks because she needed a job.
”I had no college education, no experience. I had been waitressing,”
the 38-year-old mother of four recalled last week. ”It was one of the few full-time jobs in this area with benefits.”
In this hard country that still has some of the feel of the frontier, a few of the old boys figured that she would feature biscuit recipes on the front page or a four-part series on Hints from Heloise.
Not hardly, fellas. Yennard proved that you don`t need to smoke a cigar or graduate from Columbia School of Journalism to be a professional journalist. She puts out a good little newspaper, and apparently she is capable of doing something a lot of other small-town newspaper editors can`t manage. She serves her readers-not just her advertisers.
This is a lot tougher than it sounds. The smaller the paper, the more crucial the advertiser to the monthly budget. If the local grocer gets mad about an editorial and pulls his ads, it won`t take long before the editor has trouble keeping food on his or her table.
Many small newspapers-the ones that seem to survive-are tiny arms of the local lords of commerce. At these papers, news is something that fits sweetly around the ads. The reader is never disturbed, never offended and seldom informed.
The last week in June, while other area weeklies were touting frog contests and ice cream socials on their front pages, Yennard`s weekly featured genuine news-a home health-care shortage, a politician running for town supervisor, a committee being formed at the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). These were stories that could make some difference to people`s lives and their property.
”My biggest complaint before I took this job was that you couldn`t pick up the paper and find out what the APA had done at their last meeting, the kind of stuff that affects all of us,” she said. She hired three part-time correspondents to cover board meetings in her county (they are paid by the story), and Yennard became the ”editorial staff” in the paper`s home office in Speculator, N.Y.
She fired up the editorial page by tackling local issues-for example, blasting the proposal for an office building that she figured the county couldn`t afford. Before Yennard, the standard editorial stayed on secure and uncontroversial ground. ”One safe bet,” she explained, ”was always to blame it on Washington.”
The changes startled many of the sleepy readers in Hamilton County.
”People had a hard time adjusting at first,” Yennard recalled.
Most of them apparently managed to come around. Circulation has gone from 2,500 to about 4,000 under Yennard`s stewardship. Advertising has increased so that with a paper that`s 50 percent news and 50 percent ads, its summer size is 28 to 32 pages.
To be sure, these are better times in the Adirondacks than they were several years ago. The summer trade is booming. Winter sports are drawing the kind of New York City people who barely notice when coffee is $1 a cup.
Yennard is not entirely alone in her venture. The Hamilton County News is part of a small chain run by a family that owns the Amsterdam (N.Y.) Recorder. This gives Yennard a chance to make waves in the short run, as long as she continues to make money in the long run.
If her competition makes money by boosterism, Yennard doesn`t turn up her nose. ”It has its place. It should be in the paper, too,” she said of the good news. So under the headline ”What`s Up?” throughout her paper, she has small features of local interest-a young woman who made the dean`s list at college, the husband of a local woman who got an award from the State Department.
But she also runs reports on who was arrested for catching too many fish. And she features every letter she can verify, even those that are sent to Gov. Mario Cuomo via the Hamilton County News office. A recent tome ran under the headline: ”She Can Smell the Manure.” It was from a woman who was upset that the state would not allow the handicapped to run their electric wheelchairs in the wilderness.
”I think I have found my niche,” Yennard said as she managed a few minutes to talk just before deadline. ”It`s a labor of love, all 40 to 60 hours a week.”
Cristine Knapp Yennard may have thought she was simply looking for a job when she applied to the Hamilton County News. What she found was a calling.
