All the way back in the mid-1980s, I found my first-ever “hometown” newspaper: The Washington Post.
I wasn’t in D.C. yet — I was actually three hours south on Interstate 81 in Lexington, Va., studying print journalism at Washington and Lee University. Each morning at the campus bookstore, three daily papers were for sale: the Post, the New York Times, and the Washington Times. Both Times were not for me, because I wasn’t that interested in New York and I had no patience for the cult of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
Plus, the Post had three full pages of comic strips. Comics were one of the ways I taught myself to read, slowly sounding out the words from the strips in newspapers at my grandparents’ house when I was four. Hell, the funny pages are probably the thing I miss most today.
Those newspapers back home in Kentucky, however, never felt like a “hometown” paper when I was a kid. Whether it was the Paducah Sun or Hopkinsville’s Kentucky New Era, they always arrived on a one-day delay so they w…
