‘It’s rewarding in its own self’: Monitor’s volunteer town criers receive award
Published: 10-20-2024 12:01 PM
Modified: 10-22-2024 12:26 PM |
Nearly 30 years ago, Cheryl Stinson decided to respond to an ad in the Concord Monitor looking for a Penacook town crier.
A volunteer position, each town crier writes a short weekly column detailing community happenings, dubbed Talk of the Towns nowadays. Stinson had passed it by once since she was a new mom. But in 1995 with her daughter a year old, the timing felt right.
“I never envisioned that 29 years later I’d still be doing it,” Stinson said.
Though not a staffer, Stinson, and her fellow town criers, since the creation of the volunteer positions in the early 1990s, have weathered changes to the paper, adjustments to the way their columns are presented, and seen the newspaper industry make the transition from print only to having both a print edition and a news website.
To honor their efforts, they are being recognized at Volunteer NH’s 2024 Spirit of NH Awards Ceremony on Monday night.
Stinson’s first column was published on April 16, 1995, in the fairly new Sunday Monitor during a time before the widespread use of email, and long before town websites and social media made community information more easily accessible. Content, often on physical pieces of paper, passed through many hands each day before the broadsheets whirred through the press at a dizzying speed.
“We had our names and our landline phone numbers at the end with our picture,” she said, noting that all the town criers had their photograph taken by one of the newspaper’s photographers.
“People were calling us with their news or mailing us,” she said. Once she was finished writing up her column, Stinson then drove to the Monitor building off Sewalls Falls Road, which was still fairly new, and handed over a hard copy.
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But even with a switch to email, common use of smartphones and social media, and the ability to have any information available at one’s fingertips, the town criers have prevailed.
Their columns have moved to a combined weekend edition this past spring that comes out on Saturdays – and folks who serve on the paper’s reader advisory board talk about how much they appreciate “Talk of the Towns,” the space shared by the slate of 20 town criers.
The group of Monitor town criers had only been on the job roughly three years when Stinson took her post.
Mark Travis was the Monitor’s first Sunday editor. His duties were, unsurprisingly, editing the new Sunday edition.
It was a step forward for Travis in his decades-long career at the Monitor that began in 1980, when he became a part-time stringer covering Pittsfield. He spent a few years at the Valley News, the Monitor’s sister paper, before moving down to Florida for a short time. He returned to the area in 1986, becoming a reporter for the Monitor. From there, he took on various positions, eventually serving as publisher for a year in 2013.
The Monitor’s first Sunday paper was printed in September 1992 and the town criers, originally, were not part of the content plan.
But, as Travis describes, it’s easy to see where legendary editor Mike Pride got the idea, albeit one that Travis dubbed “nutty” at the time.
The Monitor’s other six editions had a community news page, which changed names throughout the years – Along the Merrimack, About the Towns, and eventually, just Community News.
The page was devoted to a combination of press releases, personal notes, an “everyday life component of the daily paper,” Travis said.
But editors at the time didn’t want a seventh day of community news. The Sunday edition was different, dedicated to longer stories on “simmering” issues, or lookaheads at what was to come during the following week, he described.
Many news sources were launching Sunday editions at the time, Travis said, including the Valley News, and the Keene Sentinel.
It was a sign of the times. The Monitor had moved to its new building in 1990 with so many staff, including shifts of press operators, it was difficult to find a parking spot.
Each night, the proofs of the broadsheet pages were handed through a little window between the press and the rest of the building. The hulking machine would spit out thousands of copies that were then picked up for delivery throughout the area.
In August 1992, a month before the new Sunday paper was set to launch, Pride presented the idea of volunteer columnists who would write about what was going on in each of their communities, giving them the name “town criers.”
Travis was doubtful. Not only did he think the idea was bonkers, he didn’t believe it was sustainable.
“It seemed unlikely to me,” Travis said, “but it was the best idea we had.”
He followed Pride’s lead and presented the idea to the public via an article. Multiple people responded. What started as a group of 15 town criers ballooned into the 20s at one point.
The attraction to the town crier role has to do with several factors, Travis believes. Each community has its own character, and that’s created by the people who live there. Some of them are willing to tap into that unique sense of community and share it. The feedback and recognition propelled them forward.
“Even when someone decided it was time to stop, they would always find someone to hand it off to,” he said. “It just became a little self-sustaining dimension of the Sunday paper. That was, it brought some personality to it because the criers would have their own personalities and it reflected that. So in a way, it was ahead of its time in the sense that social media has made everyone a publisher.”
Just as launching a Sunday edition was a sign of the times in the ‘90s, eliminating it was a sign of the mid-2020s.
But even with the transition from the Sunday Monitor to a combined weekend edition as every other daily newspaper in Northern New England has done, the town criers made the switch.
As Stinson described, her column is now put together with the help of people emailing things to her and searching the internet.
Readers wishing to contact the town criers can find their email addresses outlined in a box surrounded by their contributions.
Jean Ver Hoeven became Concord’s town crier around 10 years ago and, for her, it was a great way to learn about a new community she’d only moved to several years before.
An engineer, she also secretly wanted to be a journalist and this was a way to fulfill that dream.
Pictures of the contributors were still in the paper back then, and Ver Hoeven said she was recognized a few times over the years.
“Somebody would recognize me and boy, I’ll tell you, that’s a great way to get a big head,” she said. “But it was such a treat.”
For Judith Ackerson, Franklin’s town crier, who has been on the job since around 2012, it’s been a way to spread positivity in, and about, her beloved community.
Ackerson moved to Franklin in 1976 and raised her kids there, but commuting to Concord meant losing some of the connection to New Hampshire’s smallest city.
“I’ve always been a cheerleader for Franklin,” she said. “It’s a neat little town, and it’s had its bumps along the way, but we’re certainly on the way up, and I just like to promote that.”
While the town crier columns have spanned the pre-internet era to now, both Ackerson and Ver Hoeven stressed the continued importance of their work, from building a sense of community to allowing those who may prefer the physical paper to know what’s going on around them.
“We are in a transition period from old-fashioned information sharing to the modern electronic age,” Ackerson said.
Town crier information is also easily shareable online, and Ackerson cross-posts her columns on local Facebook pages.
Beyond that, both Ver Hoeven and Ackerson said that Talk of the Towns puts all upcoming community events in one place.
“There’s a better chance the reader can catch or even actively scan other towns,” Ver Hoeven said. “An internet search can be pretty specific.”
In Franklin, for example, Ackerson said she loves to see what’s happening at Salisbury’s library. Plus, Salisbury also is involved with the Franklin Animal Shelter, a shared resource.
Then there’s the fact that not every community is featured daily in the paper, but they are guaranteed a spot in Talk of the Towns.
“It lets readers know that they are not left behind or ignored by their hometown paper,” Ver Hoeven said. Plus, the information is available to loyal readers and also to newcomers.
While town criers don’t save lives, or solve other community problems, they help bring communities together, Ver Hoeven noted, and uniting a community can help to solve challenges.
Surprisingly, even though many of them have been at it for years, and they share a space in the newspaper, many of the town criers have not met each other in person. The award ceremony will allow them to do that.
Ver Hoeven joked it’s like they’ve been separated at birth.
“There’s never been a picnic or a Christmas party or anything like that,” she said. “And so we’ve never met, so it’s very weird.”
Ackerson said being recognized for her volunteer work is “certainly lovely,” but that’s not why she does it.
“It’s fun and it’s rewarding in its own self,” she said. “You just do it because you love doing it and people appreciate it.”
Arianna MacNeill can be reached at amacneill@cmonitor.com.