Road Trip!

Post-Trip Review: Scorecard

Alakazam!

Note: This is the fifteenth in a series of posts describing my effort to get letters published in newspapers in every state and territory of the U.S.A. You can read the whole series here.

Numbers

When I set out on my letter-writing road trip, my only goal was numerical: I wanted to have letters published in 50 states, 5 territories, and 1 district.

This document lists all of my published letters.

This document breaks down my publication statistics several different ways, and it also includes a list of every newspaper to which I submitted letters, and their websites and submission guidelines as of the middle of the year 2021.

For those who prefer a summary, I had 87 letters published in 63 different newspapers in 50 states and 3 territories. I had 17 letters published in Alabama, with 15 in The Anniston Star. I had 4 letters in North Dakota, 3 each in Georgia and Texas, and 1 or 2 in each of the remaining states or territories where I had any published. I had no letters published in American Samoa, Puerto Rico, or Washington, D.C.

My local paper leads the pack because I submitted letters to them for over a year before I set out to be published more widely.

North Dakota comes in second because I found in the Minot Daily News a paper that publishes a lot of letters, and with no stated limit on word count. At various points in my road trip, if I was having trouble breaking into a new state I would sometimes do another submission to a paper that had already printed something of mine. Also, if I had a long letter and I cut it down to suit more papers, sometimes I would also submit the long version to Minot. Getting repeat publications in a newspaper was only mildly gratifying at the time, since my main focus was on booking another state or territory. Without that goal in mind, nowadays I would welcome any publication, repeat or otherwise. The worst outcome is to spend time on a letter that never gets published, though of course even those become grist for the humor mill.

In Texas I had three publications of the same letter. This happened because when I would first try a state, I would send the letter to multiple papers in hopes of getting one publication. In Texas I happened to submit a letter with a conservative viewpoint on voting rights, and it caught on in three papers. I had carefully gathered information on six newspapers in preparation for a long campaign, but I broke through immediately.

In Georgia I had three different letters across two newspapers. Georgia was my third state with a published letter, after Alabama and Arkansas. I would have stopped at two letters in one paper, but later in the road trip I submitted another letter to a Georgia paper to which a friend of mine subscribed, so she could see one of my letters in her print edition.

My successes in three of five territories, and in Hawaii, were all due to one letter with a sandy beach theme. That letter went nowhere in two other island territories.

By not getting published in two territories and one district, I failed to meet my goal. However, I consider it an honorable failure because after testing the waters in those places I stopped cold.

American Samoa and Puerto Rico are perpetually dealing with terrible problems, and I never saw an ounce of humor or satire in either place. I would not dream of disturbing them by pretending to know something about their issues. I will do that with chicken and waffles in Arizona, or pickle ball in Paducah, but not with human trafficking or poverty or health crises or rising sea levels in island territories.

Washington, D.C. has two main papers that are more national than provincial in character. They have flashes of humor, but they deal almost exclusively with broad political issues and I simply didn’t want to keep pounding out letters of that kind. I saw no hope for my random musings, so I left them to their never-ending arguments. I didn’t worry about offending those locals, but I just didn’t think that devising a political opinion of the kind they publish would feel like an accomplishment.

Better Than Numbers

Halfway through my road trip, I realized that I had discovered an activity that I could happily pursue forever. The process of reading local newspapers, researching the towns through their own websites and related Wikipedia pages, looking at maps, and thinking of things to write that would appeal to local editors, was enormously fun and gratifying. If I didn’t have other very time-consuming goals for my writing, I could easily spend all my time on a perpetual road trip.

There was often a delay of days or even weeks between the date I submitted a letter and the date it was published. The papers only rarely tell you whether your letter will be published, and they never tell you a date certain. This meant that I had to visit the papers repeatedly to see if my letters were published. I eventually settled on one month as the longest I would keep looking for my letters. Have you ever followed the newspaper of another town every day for a full month? I did that with many papers. Quite often I found myself following news stories, the fates of local sports teams, political drama, and just good old-fashioned down-home human interest stories, in a dozen far-flung communities every day. In some cases, I kept returning to read those papers even after my letters had appeared.

When pundits talk about breaking out of your information bubble and listening to other voices, I rarely hear them give practical advice on how to do that, aside from following a few different people on social media or perhaps reading two national newspapers instead of just one. I think a steady diet of reading a wide selection of local newspapers from all over the country would really pop the bubble. Seeing what people in other communities are actually doing and thinking, as portrayed by their local reporters and photographers and editors, strikes me as far more revealing of truth than any shouted arguments or national-level summaries that you might see on television or on social media.

Reading many local newspapers is better than some national news magazines and national websites, and it’s great fun.

Whether or not you aspire to write letters, give local newspapers a try. Check out the ones I list in my publications tracker, or find your own by doing a web search on “newspapers in Alabama” or whatever state you want to start with. Do your own state first to see how the paper reflects what you see in real life, then choose a neighboring state, and then go wild—choose the state farthest from yours and see what’s happening there.

Do act quickly, though: local newspapers are dying in droves. Some of the ones that survive are bought up by conglomerates, and they lose their local flavor. I wish that I could prescribe a cure, such as millions of people taking up the kind of reading and writing project that I embarked upon, but I doubt that will happen.

But maybe one person here and there—like you, perhaps—could give it a try and, if you enjoy it, pass the word to a few other people.

Boing!