PRESS GROUP CELEBRATES CENTURY OF AREA SERVICE

The Southeast Missouri Press Association will hold its centennial meeting in Cape Girardeau Saturday. We join our newspaper colleagues in this organization's celebration of 100 years of service throughout the region. The observance, however, is not just self-congratulatory; understanding the role of community newspapers, such as those represented in this group, is to recognize their participation in sustaining our democracy.

We nurture no illusions that all people, or even all readers, share this conviction. Newspapers are as often reviled as they are admired, in part for carrying out their rightful duty of documenting all aspects of the human condition, including the bad. Serving often as a grim messenger is a calling newspaper people have accepted, for society is not fully served indeed, it is fooled by knowing only what is pleasant and successful. That this region's organization has endured 100 years, and that newspapers have performed these tasks back to the earliest days of our nation, is testament to the fact that being constantly on the public's good side is not always necessary to being depended upon.

And that dependability that trust is the commodity most newspapers deal in. In the news columns of Southeast Missouri newspapers over the past century, the history of this region has been written in regular, almost immediate increments. The tornadoes and floods, as well as the advancements and good fortune, of the last 100 years have been chronicled on newsprint. America has gone to war a handful of times since the birth of this organization, and these newspapers, along with those who read them, hailed the nation's successful defense of freedom just as they lamented the loss of area natives. The good and bad were reported.

The Dan Rathers and Washington Posts and Newsweeks of this nation aren't equipped to understand the nuances of life in towns like Ste. Genevieve or Caruthersville or Piedmont, but there are newspapers in those places that steadfastly do this work. You won't see them listed as Pulitzer Prize finalists or written up in journalism's elite periodicals, but they are out there, doing a time-honored job.

Information is the nourishment of democracy, and where a strong newspaper exists, better government exists. In celebrating our work, we applaud the Southeast Missouri Press Association as it enters its second century. May the members of this group continue to make the public more knowledgeable of the world around them, particularly this small parcel of it.