The Montague Reporter Has the Scoop

David Detmold came into the cafe the other day to pick up an ad for his newspaper, the Montague Reporter. This sprightly 20-page vehicle for local news is well supported by advertisers, including our GoNOMAD Cafe, and features just the kind of unique and local coverage that the newspaper medium is perfect for.

He only prints news about those four towns…Montague, Gill, Wendell, Millers, Lake Pleasant, nothing from AP, nothing from a syndicate. Just the stuff no one else has. He’s not going to have the problems ‘the driveby media’ are having by being phased out of relevance by the web. I admire his putting our a real paper for the area.

Here’s a snip from a recent article about an issue in Turners Falls–Graffiti.

Police Crack Case was the headline. It was a story Detmold wrote about the perps who kept spray painting ‘mega’ and ASK all over downtown Turners. It took the survelliance of a water dept. employee named Steve Fitzpatrick to uncover the truth. It was a Hallmark Photography student from California. They called his dad. He offered to pay as long as they didn’t put his son’s name in the paper. The chief Ray Zukowski said that if dad did pay, he could avoid a record. The end of the story was a beaut–

“Tell that to the landlords on 3rd or 4th Street, where a quick walk down the alley found 18 examples of graffiti tagging on fences, dumpsters, and the sides of buildings in just half a block, not counting the monogram on the ice machine at the Exxon across the street. “Think it’s easy to scrub the indelible paint off the bricks and chapboards? Don’t ASK.”