The Health Of The Community Newspaper

The Evening Star appeared downtown in 1852 and, renamed the Washington Star, lasted until 1981, when its final parent (my then-employer) Time Incorporated shuttered it. (Today Time is confronting its own digital-age survival challenges.)

The Post (where I did two stints) arrived in 1877 as a “four-page organ of the Democratic Party,” the Britannica says. It was joined in the 20th century by the original Washington Times, the Times-Herald and Washington Daily News.

Attribution:Charlie Clark - fcnp.com
Full story: Our man in Arlington

Six Days in July: The 1967 Detroit Riots

Haynes Johnson of the Washington Star Syndicate asked about the chances of similar riots across the country.
Cavanagh said that Congress was indifferent to the issues that many Americans faced. “What will it profit this country if we, say, put a man on the moon by 1970 and at the same time you can’t walk down Woodward Avenue in this city without some fear of violence,” Cavanagh said. “We may be able to pacify every village in Vietnam over a period of years but what good does it do if we can’t pacify the American cities.”

Attribution: clickondetroit.com
Full article: Detroit

Newspaper legacy, journalist Barbara DeWitt Smith returns to Wyoming Valley

When I was a young girl, I used to walk the four-mile round trip from our house on Shrine View to the library on Main Street in Dallas to get my Nancy Drew books. After reading the first one, I remember standing in my bedroom and saying out loud: “I’m going to write a book!”

And so all these years later, I have.

In May, my first book was published. “Home At Last” is a memoir that tells all the family secrets of growing up in a privileged but nutty, colorful household. My father used to write the Little Studies column in the Times Leader about his trials and tribulations of dealing with his five daughters and their antics. And everyone would say, “Oh, that Smith family is so colorful!”

My four sisters and I all went to the Day School and then went away to boarding school (where I used my middle name and became known as DeWitt Smith because there were four other Barbaras in my class). I was the only Smith sister who returned to the Back Mountain to live, back in 1979, for a year, before moving to Washington, D.C. to work for the Washington Star.

Attribution:Barbara DeWitt Smith - For Times Leader
Full Story: Home At Last