Celebrations and Awards Help Build Community

The front page of THE HARTSVILLE MESSENGER this past Wednesday included a prominent photo of Jamie Morphis accepting the Hartsville Citizen of the Year Award. This Award is presented by the Hartsville Rotary Club, and has been decades. Celebrating community heroes is one of the tools for building stronger communities.  In Hartsville, we are fortunate to have the opportunity for a lot of these hero celebrations and they continue to play a vital role in the community-building culture so important to the vitality of this community.

Jamie Morphis, whose community building accomplishments are long, was not the only person honored at the Hartsville Chamber of Commerce Annual Dinner this past Monday night. The Chamber's program included several other hero-recognitions by other community organizations. And as I write about this topic you should notice that having an umbrella organization like a Chamber, which Rich Harwood might call a boundary-spanning organization as the host for such a recognition event is another crucial tool in the community-building kit.

Celebrations of people and celebrations of accomplishments are important in our process because it shows what we, as a community, believe are important to our culture and key areas to spend some of our precious resources.

The link above to the Chamber website will show photos of the Volunteer of the Year, the Caregiver of the Year, the Businessperson of the Year, the Innovator of the Year and the Young Professional of the Year. Celebrations show momentum and if you are involved in community building -- let those celebrations continue!

Communication Power in Community Building

There is a story that every time a carpenter sees a problem he goes for the hammer. So, every time a communicator sees a problem or an opportunity the she or he generally says, 'how can we get the word out.' In fact, that is something I teach regularly in my Coker College communication classes. Often, those who don't see communication as all that important don't put as much stock into that strategy.

But, today's MESSENGER in Hartsville shows some of the power of communicating to set a mood and a tone and provide, I think, momentum. We like our slogan, "Hartsville, The Art of Good Living," and we like to follow that with the urging to "Expect Pleasant Surprises." Today's paper is demonstrating both of those ideas while showing some of the power of communication.

** The top headline
"$150 million in development"
**adjacent headline
Hampton Inn & Suites coming to Vista area
** Next headline
Delayed apartment complex back on track

And those headlines are joined above the fold by a sports ear that says the HHS baseball team has at least a second place in the conference and a reminder that the 'Anything Butt BBQ Contest' is coming.

Those headlines, at least in one reader, generate some powerful positive emotions. Those are projects that have been discussed for some time and it is great to read they are coming to reality.

But, while on the idea of the positive emotions, the Art of Good Living and Pleasant Surprises as you go below the fold on today's newspaper you see the headline of the Black Creek Kayak/Canoe Festival set for next weekend.

Hartsville is a unique community with a great deal happening nearly all the time. The power of communication, we hope, will bring more people in to help continue this tradition of generating pleasant surprises in all areas of life in this small South Carolina city.

Rich Harwood, The Harwood Institute, has some community building tools that include an assessment of the community he calls Community Rhythms. With communication like we are reading in today's paper we can feel the Rhythm of growth, the Rhythm of Hope.

There is much more -- but for another blog.

Newspapers -- were heart of community building

What now?

As we think about community much of this blog is focused on Hartsville, SC. Today the focus is newspapers and their demise, which is being accelerated by business decisions that just don't make sense to this newspaper consumer.

Marsha Mercer's last column for Media General is at the bottom of the editorial page of the MORNING NEWS of Florence, SC, this morning. "Media General deacided a few weeks ago to close the Washington bureau March 27, joing the other media corporations that have taken that difficult step because of the sharp decline in advertising revenues." What are they thinking? What is THE STATE newspaper in Columbia, SC, and their parent McClatchy thinking when they lay off journalists -- the lifeblood of their product?

Media companies all over this country are laying off (firing) employees and particularly journalists to save costs because their ad revenues are down. Many of these media companies are also putting many of their reporters -- print, online and television -- on unpaid furloughs. What does all this mean? Well, the product that news organizations offer consumers is news. The product that news organizations offer advertisers is readership/viewership. When you take away the news that is unique to your medium you take away any reason -- at all -- for readers (consumers) to buy your product. And, generally, most of these companies are not only downsizing their news product they are raising the cost of the product. In my marketing communication classes we quickly cover the traditional 4-Ps of marketing -- Product/Price/Place/Promotion. Is there no one in the business offices of these major media conglomerates (usually the vanguard of marketing) left who remembers the basics?

But, for those of us on the outside this accelerating demise of the news and local news media is even more disturbing. Generally, you would be able to study strong communities and find strong newspapers at their core. What happens to the communities when the newspapers disappear? we know in the small city of Hartsville, SC, that when the news hole is compressed there is a lot less common knowledge of what is happening in the community. We had a recent example of that when the editor of the THE MESSENGER provided the community with a pretty comprehensive article about the serious problem of dilapidated housing that is plaguing the city, especially our South Hartsville area. The editor's article shows the power of the press in highlighting important issues. But, we don't get nearly as much of that any longer in Hartsville, in Columbia, in Charlotte and the list goes on.

My communication career started when I was 12 years old and I entered the communication distribution business in one of the greatest hands-on business training programs available -- the local paper route. So, there is no question that I am a big nostalgic about the way the newspaper companies are accelerating the death of this medium. At the same time, the concern comes in that currently there is nothing taking the place of newspapers in the communication leadership of our communities. That is distressing for the short run. For the longer term I am optimistic that we are going to see some caring, intelligent media mavens who find a way to craft community communication solutions using the multi-platform media that is quickly being perfected. (Think of blogs for example -- we have the ability right in this space to provide words, to provide video pictures and sound, to provide audio files when just voice will work and a wide variety of photos and graphics.) Doug Fisher with grants from the J-Lab at the University of Maryland and some funds from the previous Messenger owners developed Hartville's HARTSVILLE TODAY citizen journalism web platform. As it continues to develop, it might be one of the bridges to the new media.

But in the interim, what are the media companies thinking?