If you lived here you would be home by now.

The future of local journalism.

If local print journalism has any kind of future whatsoever, it most likely will be a bit like this magazine, which we picked up during our jaunt across the US border the other week. [Click the thumbnails for bigger, btw.]

I’m serious. If you freely distribute a magazine that is full of local adverts and content that reflects the community, as long as it’s high in quality and well-produced people will take you seriously and keep coming back for more. You won’t become Citizen Kane, but you will be contributing to your society.

For instance, take this important advertorial for the local Catholic scool, erm, hang on.

Well, I’m sure that’s just an oversight. As long as it doesn’t sit in the same few pages as anything un-Catholic, like an advert for a gentlemen’s club, I’m sure the scool, oh sorry, school, won’t mind.

Hokay, well, you know, I’m sure nobody’s made any other mistakes with advert placement…

Oh well. Perhaps we can have a look at some of the other adverts that have been deemed suitable to appear in the paper.

Let’s move swiftly on from the strangely-sourced adverts. In every local community there’s a good writer just waiting to be found. Most of the best journalists around started writing for their locals – in fact, many still do, improving the quality of local journalism even more with their experience.

So please, stand up, the western New York state Julie Burchill.

Never mind. What about Allegany county’s answer to Robert Fisk?

I’m sure you’ll have everybody nodding in agreement there with your well-reasoned, carefully argued point about, about, erm, whatever your point was.

Look, despite all of this, I don’t mean to mock really. I just think it’s important to have the correct skills in your community to produce a paper they can be proud of. It doesn’t matter if it’s free, there’s certainly a demand for advertorial and print adverts, and from that you must be able to get some income to pay editors and writers, even if it is only a little. There must be someone to hold accountable, right?

Le sigh.

Just as well the e-mail address you’ve given to contact your magazine doesn’t mean anything amusing in British slang, does it?

Oh.