Ever since I went to New York City where I lived for ten years I have enjoyed the tabloids and newspapers. The New York Times, the New York Post and the New York Observer interested me regularly. The Standard Examiner in Ogden and the Las Vegas Journal Review in Nevada have been wonderful too with news, advertisements, sport scores and more. The columns are good as forms of entertainment or political insight and persuasion. These newspapers like columns are meant to be read for enjoyment and information.

Fat Mac, Space Cowboy and the Biorhythm Man are just a few of the many colorful characters you’ll meet in News Hound: Adventures of a Small-Town Journalist.

This sometimes poignant and often lighthearted look at news gathering in rural northern Michigan follows a rookie reporter in his search for truth, democracy and a more marketable resume.  It examines some of the unusual challenges facing weekly newspaper writers and pokes plenty of good-natured fun at the workings of local society.

We meet cops, robbers, astronauts, bullies, teachers, writers, eccentrics, and a host of everyday heroes and heroines who give unselfishly to their communities and neighbors.  Best of all, we come face to face with ourselves in the lives of those whose stories grace the book’s pages.

The stories are based on the experiences of author Mike VanBuren, who for 2 ½ years in the late 1970s and early 1980s worked as a reporter, photographer, and editor at two county-seat weekly newspapers in Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula.

“There may be more glamour and prestige associated with big-time news jobs in large metropolitan areas,” writes VanBuren, “but I don’t believe there are many experiences as rounding – or humbling – as practicing journalism in a small town.”

Not only do small-town journalists typically cover all news, sports, society, and entertainment beats simultaneously, he says, they’re apt to run into the subjects of their coverage within hours of the stories being printed or broadcast.  This brings about a sort of in-your-face dynamic for news reporting, which doesn’t necessarily signify a bold reporter challenging the errant status quo.  It more likely means that the people mentioned in news stories, columns, or editorials will soon be in the reporter’s face with comments, suggestions, and personal threats.  

It can be a wonderfully educating experience for a writer to see the direct impact of a story on the people it describes, or on the community in which they live.  It makes the reporter care a lot about accuracy, balance, and fairness – little bits of professional etiquette that at times can get brushed under the rug in situations where reporters have no direct follow-up contact with the subjects of their stories.

In a large city, a reporter may never again run into the people that he or she writes about.  In a small town, however, these people will probably be sitting at the next table at a local restaurant during dinner that evening, or taking tickets at the high school basketball game.  They always seem to know precisely who the reporter is, and aren’t a bit shy about voicing their thoughts and opinions.

“I learned a lot about people – their passions, their honesty, and their integrity – through my years as a small-town journalist,” writes VanBuren.  “I also learned a bit about their arrogance, pride, and deceit – unpleasant sidelights that most of us have co-existing in our lives.”

NewsHound: Adventures of a Small-Town Journalist laughs heartily at these human foibles, while simultaneously celebrating the array of people, thoughts and ideas that make our lives rich and rewarding.

This book is an album of the famous and infamous seen through the attentive eye of the late journalist Helen Dudar—“a writer,” as the editor’s preface remarks, “of wit, grace, rigor, intellect and astonishing range.” In these pages, Paul Cézanne cohabits with John Updike, Sigmund Freud with Shelley Winters, Michael Douglas with Malcolm X; Dylan Thomas and Janice Joplin are discovered sleeping under the same roof, although in different beds and at different times; Woody Allen is encountered as a young comic on the way up, Henry Kissinger as a world leader on the way down, Norman Mailer as an office-seeker on the way nowhere. The threads binding them together in these fifty-two stories are Dudar’s luminous prose, her authoritative voice, and her keen, ironic vision. “She is a writer’s writer, a journalist’s journalist, and a reporter’s reporter,” the filmmaker Nora Ephron says in her introduction. “...Helen Dudar writes frequently about everything and does it better than just about anyone else.”
                  The Editor

This book is an album of the famous and infamous seen through the attentive eye of the late journalist Helen Dudar—“a writer,” as the editor’s preface remarks, “of wit, grace, rigor, intellect and astonishing range.” In these pages, Paul Cézanne cohabits with John Updike, Sigmund Freud with Shelley Winters, Michael Douglas with Malcolm X; Dylan Thomas and Janice Joplin are discovered sleeping under the same roof, although in different beds and at different times; Woody Allen is encountered as a young comic on the way up, Henry Kissinger as a world leader on the way down, Norman Mailer as an office-seeker on the way nowhere. The threads binding them together in these fifty-two stories are Dudar’s luminous prose, her authoritative voice, and her keen, ironic vision. “She is a writer’s writer, a journalist’s journalist, and a reporter’s reporter,” the filmmaker Nora Ephron says in her introduction. “...Helen Dudar writes frequently about everything and does it better than just about anyone else.”
                  The Editor

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This is a collection of Letters to the Editor, and other essays, written passionately and with conviction, over a period of forty years.

Meyer Rangell takes the freedom of the press seriously and personally , and uses our precious press freedom to express opinions on the important issues of the day, including nuclear war, international relations, the United Nations, our health care system, racism, ,religion, poverty and disease in the modern world, drug abuse, violence, crime, and anything else that comes to his inquiring mind. A free press, he maintains, properly utilized by involved citizens, should contribute to that elusive "public opinion" which shapes the nature of our democratic society.

This is a collection of Letters to the Editor, and other essays, written passionately and with conviction, over a period of forty years.

Meyer Rangell takes the freedom of the press seriously and personally , and uses our precious press freedom to express opinions on the important issues of the day, including nuclear war, international relations, the United Nations, our health care system, racism, ,religion, poverty and disease in the modern world, drug abuse, violence, crime, and anything else that comes to his inquiring mind. A free press, he maintains, properly utilized by involved citizens, should contribute to that elusive "public opinion" which shapes the nature of our democratic society.

Cub reporter Kris Dillman is excited about the prospect of covering Rush Ramond, Jefferson High’s superstar basketball player who is due to be the first junior selected in the NBA draft. But the broad racial lines that cut through the heart of Kris´s beat provide numerous obstacles. One of which is The Blockade: a stone-covered hill with a cyclone fence topped with V-braced barbed wire. It bisects what was originally a through street, conspicuously at the threshold where the neighborhood goes from predominately white to predominately black. While negotiating this treacherous terrain, Kris learns about media hypocrisy, bigotry and accountability; public relations hype, manipulation and intimidation; and how a simple news tip can lead to murder…

Cub reporter Kris Dillman is excited about the prospect of covering Rush Ramond, Jefferson High’s superstar basketball player who is due to be the first junior selected in the NBA draft. But the broad racial lines that cut through the heart of Kris´s beat provide numerous obstacles. One of which is The Blockade: a stone-covered hill with a cyclone fence topped with V-braced barbed wire. It bisects what was originally a through street, conspicuously at the threshold where the neighborhood goes from predominately white to predominately black. While negotiating this treacherous terrain, Kris learns about media hypocrisy, bigotry and accountability; public relations hype, manipulation and intimidation; and how a simple news tip can lead to murder…

Group citizen journalism is emerging in local communities as mainstream media reduces its reporting ranks. This book describes how community group journalism operates at adult and youth levels.

An intimate, inside look at the internal workings of three pioneering publications—that started in 1996, 1998 and 2003—reflects the satisfaction and energizing effect of being able to publish widely without the benefit of a printing press.

Group citizen journalism is emerging in local communities as mainstream media reduces its reporting ranks. This book describes how community group journalism operates at adult and youth levels.

An intimate, inside look at the internal workings of three pioneering publications—that started in 1996, 1998 and 2003—reflects the satisfaction and energizing effect of being able to publish widely without the benefit of a printing press.

Group citizen journalism is emerging in local communities as mainstream media reduces its reporting ranks. This book describes how community group journalism operates at adult and youth levels.

An intimate, inside look at the internal workings of three pioneering publications—that started in 1996, 1998 and 2003—reflects the satisfaction and energizing effect of being able to publish widely without the benefit of a printing press.

Imagine this book as an improbable cocktail party. All the people who populate this collection of journalistic works by Jerry Miller, living and dead, are there, holding martinis or grape Nehis (a lot of them are from Middle America after all), telling their stories, showing their human sides, keeping their lives in motion for the writer of descriptive narrative journalism to depict in his work and, thereby, evoke deeper and more unexpected responses than the more expository, facts-only approach of traditional reportage.
Quite the party, this one. People you know because they are celebrities or because they live just down the street, because they made headlines or because they tried and didn’t get their allotted fifteen minutes of fame. So, walk into the party, mingle, see the characters up close and personal, again thanks to a brand of literary journalism that believes its subjects are far more human and complex than just the bare facts that appear on their driver’s licenses, which probably aren’t accurate, anyway.
Look, over there in one corner is the country music contingent. Loretta Lynn holding court with Skeeter Davis and Tom T. Hall, who is quite a storyteller in his own right. And all three came through Indiana to perform at one time or another. So did many others, like Crystal Gayle, Carl Perkins, Ray Price, and Ernest Tubb, but they couldn’t make the party (or the book).
Tiny Tim is trying to break into that claque, or any other for that matter, but they won’t let him in.
Over by the window are the songwriters, living and dead. The Indiana boy who made “Stardust” a word in all our vocabularies, and the sickly humorous author of such classics as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Old Dope Peddler.”
Nearby, too, are the Hollywood types. Quite a range of them, from Spanky McFarland to Wolfman Jack, the Lone Ranger to Martin Sheen. They won’t let Tiny Tim into their conversations, either.
The biggest group of all probably is the one over by the beer cooler. The auto racing crowd – Jeff Gordon, A. J. Foyt, Jan Opperman, Andy Granatelli, and a young stock car driver hoping to make the same kind of headlines the others have. There are the Indy 500’s most legendary losers, too, from Ralph DePalma to Andy Granatelli (before he finally won the big race). The author has spent a lot of time at race tracks in his lifetime, so these are the people he invited first. After all, he did once write a whole book about those guys (and a girl or two) with grease on their uniforms and blinding speed in their blood.Other sparkles of fame are scattered around the room. Jesse Jackson is here. So is Dick the Bruiser. And Dave Barry and The Great Imposter. All of them, except maybe the Imposter, will talk your leg off. The Bruiser will also rip it off if you give him reason (like suggesting that pro wrestling is fake).
Oh, hey, there’s the pope, John Paul II, sipping a small class of communion wine, imagine that. Tiny Tim keeps asking him to forgive him for calling Satan a beautiful angel. The Holy Father just keeps sipping. And there’s ex-senator Birch Bayh, proudly talking up his son, the senator and perennial Mr. Congeniality of the vice presidential nominating contest. Vernon Jordan is here, as well, fully recovered from his assassination attempt in Indiana (not the state’s proudest moment). And Bobby Garwood, whoever he was once upon a time.The entire population of Economy, Indiana, is here, too, all bemoaning how the American economy for which it was named continues to pass it by over on a highway in eastern Indiana. Another small town has squeezed in, too, the one that beat some of the biggest schools in the state to get to the state high school basketball tournament’s finals down in the big city (Indianapolis).
It just gets more and more diverse, this odd menagerie of imaginary cocktail partiers. Hobart Freeman, the faith-healing pastor of the old Faith Assembly, hanging around waiting for someone to get sick. Iranian hostage Rick Kupke, another Indiana boy who made his 444 days of fame, then moved to California.
The lesser lights are mingling around, too. The Peace Pilgrim, who won’t tell you her name or age, a platoon of superb roller skaters, Emmett Kelley’s son, an old science teacher who put a lot of his faith and elbow grease into creating soap bubbles for the ages, two extraordinary Scrabble-playing brothers from over in Muncie, and the odd curator of the School of Magic and Witchcraft. Play it safe, don’t shake his hand if he offers it.Representatives of some of the more interesting places the author probed and lived to tell his readers about have showed up for the shindig. An all-night diner, a local mansion where the Spoon River poet once courted a banker’s widow, the site of Marion, Indiana’s greatest shame, the lynchings of August 7, 1930. A hotel on the way out the door, a pool hall just holding on, and the town that made the teaching of evolution and Clarence Darrow famous (or was it infamous?).
The author’s family sits around a small table toward the front. Two parents, one grandparent, a son, and an ex-wife make room for some of the author’s most memorable students from his days in a college classroom and, when he stops by, the author’s recollections of dealing with deaths and diseases and bluegill fishing and playing the clown, literally, get retold.
The invitation list keeps on going and going, without the Energizer bunny. A truck driver from the open road, a county fair with its intriguing cast of farm kids and carnies, the army of the devoted and curious followers who won’t let Indiana’s original Rebel Without a Cause rest peacefully in his nearby grave. A man who would be Henry David Thoreau but isn’t, and a man who would be Ray Bradbury and actually is.
They just keep coming in through the door (and a few through the windows). As a whole, they represent the most noteworthy and praiseworthy subjects of the author’s forty-year career in newspaper and magazine journalism. Though he was based in Indiana most of the time, the spectrum of his subjects spreads out from California to Massachusetts (and that’s just one guy!) and several points in-between. Bob Smith from Brooklyn crossed the author’s path before he became the most famous consumer of Popsicles in American film. So did a stream of young women who were eager to bare all (or maybe just some) between the covers of Playboy.
They constitute the faces, voices, places, and events that made the author’s career a genuine adventure. Into celebrity, into news events, from murders to politics, into ordinary people doing extraordinary things, into places with their own stories to retell, into translating his own experiences and relationships into something resembling insightfulness for the benefit of his readers, and even into some stories that aspired to be literary, even poetic, and occasionally may have succeeded.
The collection is the testament to the author’s idea that journalism and literature are not mutually exclusive (and never really have been), and that, ultimately, the subjective truths in life are the most honest and the most compelling. He, of course, will let the book’s readers be the final judges, as he always has.
He may even ask Tiny Tim’s opinion, if he only will come back to life and wipe the elephant crap off his tennis shoes.

Imagine this book as an improbable cocktail party. All the people who populate this collection of journalistic works by Jerry Miller, living and dead, are there, holding martinis or grape Nehis (a lot of them are from Middle America after all), telling their stories, showing their human sides, keeping their lives in motion for the writer of descriptive narrative journalism to depict in his work and, thereby, evoke deeper and more unexpected responses than the more expository, facts-only approach of traditional reportage.
Quite the party, this one. People you know because they are celebrities or because they live just down the street, because they made headlines or because they tried and didn’t get their allotted fifteen minutes of fame. So, walk into the party, mingle, see the characters up close and personal, again thanks to a brand of literary journalism that believes its subjects are far more human and complex than just the bare facts that appear on their driver’s licenses, which probably aren’t accurate, anyway.
Look, over there in one corner is the country music contingent. Loretta Lynn holding court with Skeeter Davis and Tom T. Hall, who is quite a storyteller in his own right. And all three came through Indiana to perform at one time or another. So did many others, like Crystal Gayle, Carl Perkins, Ray Price, and Ernest Tubb, but they couldn’t make the party (or the book).
Tiny Tim is trying to break into that claque, or any other for that matter, but they won’t let him in.
Over by the window are the songwriters, living and dead. The Indiana boy who made “Stardust” a word in all our vocabularies, and the sickly humorous author of such classics as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Old Dope Peddler.”
Nearby, too, are the Hollywood types. Quite a range of them, from Spanky McFarland to Wolfman Jack, the Lone Ranger to Martin Sheen. They won’t let Tiny Tim into their conversations, either.
The biggest group of all probably is the one over by the beer cooler. The auto racing crowd – Jeff Gordon, A. J. Foyt, Jan Opperman, Andy Granatelli, and a young stock car driver hoping to make the same kind of headlines the others have. There are the Indy 500’s most legendary losers, too, from Ralph DePalma to Andy Granatelli (before he finally won the big race). The author has spent a lot of time at race tracks in his lifetime, so these are the people he invited first. After all, he did once write a whole book about those guys (and a girl or two) with grease on their uniforms and blinding speed in their blood.Other sparkles of fame are scattered around the room. Jesse Jackson is here. So is Dick the Bruiser. And Dave Barry and The Great Imposter. All of them, except maybe the Imposter, will talk your leg off. The Bruiser will also rip it off if you give him reason (like suggesting that pro wrestling is fake).
Oh, hey, there’s the pope, John Paul II, sipping a small class of communion wine, imagine that. Tiny Tim keeps asking him to forgive him for calling Satan a beautiful angel. The Holy Father just keeps sipping. And there’s ex-senator Birch Bayh, proudly talking up his son, the senator and perennial Mr. Congeniality of the vice presidential nominating contest. Vernon Jordan is here, as well, fully recovered from his assassination attempt in Indiana (not the state’s proudest moment). And Bobby Garwood, whoever he was once upon a time.The entire population of Economy, Indiana, is here, too, all bemoaning how the American economy for which it was named continues to pass it by over on a highway in eastern Indiana. Another small town has squeezed in, too, the one that beat some of the biggest schools in the state to get to the state high school basketball tournament’s finals down in the big city (Indianapolis).
It just gets more and more diverse, this odd menagerie of imaginary cocktail partiers. Hobart Freeman, the faith-healing pastor of the old Faith Assembly, hanging around waiting for someone to get sick. Iranian hostage Rick Kupke, another Indiana boy who made his 444 days of fame, then moved to California.
The lesser lights are mingling around, too. The Peace Pilgrim, who won’t tell you her name or age, a platoon of superb roller skaters, Emmett Kelley’s son, an old science teacher who put a lot of his faith and elbow grease into creating soap bubbles for the ages, two extraordinary Scrabble-playing brothers from over in Muncie, and the odd curator of the School of Magic and Witchcraft. Play it safe, don’t shake his hand if he offers it.Representatives of some of the more interesting places the author probed and lived to tell his readers about have showed up for the shindig. An all-night diner, a local mansion where the Spoon River poet once courted a banker’s widow, the site of Marion, Indiana’s greatest shame, the lynchings of August 7, 1930. A hotel on the way out the door, a pool hall just holding on, and the town that made the teaching of evolution and Clarence Darrow famous (or was it infamous?).
The author’s family sits around a small table toward the front. Two parents, one grandparent, a son, and an ex-wife make room for some of the author’s most memorable students from his days in a college classroom and, when he stops by, the author’s recollections of dealing with deaths and diseases and bluegill fishing and playing the clown, literally, get retold.
The invitation list keeps on going and going, without the Energizer bunny. A truck driver from the open road, a county fair with its intriguing cast of farm kids and carnies, the army of the devoted and curious followers who won’t let Indiana’s original Rebel Without a Cause rest peacefully in his nearby grave. A man who would be Henry David Thoreau but isn’t, and a man who would be Ray Bradbury and actually is.
They just keep coming in through the door (and a few through the windows). As a whole, they represent the most noteworthy and praiseworthy subjects of the author’s forty-year career in newspaper and magazine journalism. Though he was based in Indiana most of the time, the spectrum of his subjects spreads out from California to Massachusetts (and that’s just one guy!) and several points in-between. Bob Smith from Brooklyn crossed the author’s path before he became the most famous consumer of Popsicles in American film. So did a stream of young women who were eager to bare all (or maybe just some) between the covers of Playboy.
They constitute the faces, voices, places, and events that made the author’s career a genuine adventure. Into celebrity, into news events, from murders to politics, into ordinary people doing extraordinary things, into places with their own stories to retell, into translating his own experiences and relationships into something resembling insightfulness for the benefit of his readers, and even into some stories that aspired to be literary, even poetic, and occasionally may have succeeded.
The collection is the testament to the author’s idea that journalism and literature are not mutually exclusive (and never really have been), and that, ultimately, the subjective truths in life are the most honest and the most compelling. He, of course, will let the book’s readers be the final judges, as he always has.
He may even ask Tiny Tim’s opinion, if he only will come back to life and wipe the elephant crap off his tennis shoes.