The Local Angle   

The Advertiser-Gleam has never won a design award. Its layout designer, who also collects coins from the racks and trucks papers to the post office, describes his philosophy as: "What fits." There are no real sections; that way, explains editor and co-owner Sam Harvey, everybody reads every page. As for art, the Gleam's most famous photo is of a dead dog that a road crew striped over while painting a new center line. Almost as good, says Anthony Campbell, one of two full time newswriters on staff, was the cow that sat at a picnic table.

On this particular January day, as black thunderstorms scout the way for one of the winter's worst ice storms, Harvey, 65, takes the aged Polaroid in search of a crew patching up a notoriously bumpy railroad crossing. Campbell is working on his big stories for Saturday: the sudden resignation of the Marshall County Commission chairman and a 67-year-old woman who bagged and dressed a six-point buck last weekend.

"Hey, this is Anthony," he begins his phone interviews. Everybody knows who he is, and vice versa. Community journalism, the late editor of the Shelton, Nebraska, Clipper once wrote, means recognizing your readers' voices on the phone. It also means almost absolute accessibility. As at many weeklies, visitors to the Gleam step directly into the newsroom, which is also the features and sports department, the foyer, the bookkeeper's office and the advertising division. (Small as it is, the Gleam's office is, on occasion, surprisingly noisy--because most of the news staff still uses manual typewriters.)

"Porter [Harvey] wanted the newsroom to be like a little country bank, with the president sitting in the lobby," recalls co-owner Don Woodward of his father-in-law, who died last year. "He figured these are rural people, and if you're sitting behind a big desk in a plush office, and a guy comes in with a story about a big tomato, he won't feel as comfortable."

The Gleam prints plenty of big tomato stories, and front page articles have included subjects such as the area's three Billy Bob's Barbecue restaurants that are completely unconnected; a man who tried to pry his change from a Pepsi machine and spent hours with his arm trapped inside (as the medics pulled him loose, the coins fell out); the keys to the city being stolen; news that the vandal striking the fire chief's office was believed to be a manic squirrel. "Pigeon poop piles up on courthouse porch" reads one headline, which is the same size as all other headlines. It saves space, explains Harvey, and people are going to read all the headlines anyway.

It is eminently readable, known for being eagerly passed around many a barrack, battleship and dorm. Like many small-town papers, it has its occasional howler, like, a faithful reader guiltily confides, the caption under the photo of the woman holding up two large melons in front of her chest: "Two big ones." But its crowning glory is its obituaries--still, of course, free. Long and reflective, they are filled with the kind of details relatives and neighbors swap while sitting at the funeral home--how one man, seeking solace after his wife's death seven years ago, had hand-copied the New Testament 22 times, with Jesus' words in red ink; how another was always remembered as the child who stuck the bean up her nose; how another loved cats and quilting.

But beyond the colloquial flourishes of the writing, the Gleam contains few frills. All you get is local news (history included, free of charge, says feature writer Angela Otts), including the complete police blotter, long, leisurely features, the blow-by-blow of the latest official meeting and bulletins from county correspondents, one of whom begins a report this record-breaking cold winter, "We have a lot of sick people here."

Don't even ask for coverage of an event that cannot be linked to Guntersville. Sam Harvey is a quiet man, but is steely on this subject. "We define 'local' tighter than most papers," he says. "People say, 'Well, but this affects Guntersville.' Well, everything does. We get a lot of requests, but we just don't open it up. We sometimes spend more time explaining why we can't put things in than we do actually putting things in."

Harvey has also ruled out comics, crosswords and syndicated columnists; graphics are unheard of. Gray and word-dense, the paper has run one full-color photo in its history--for an ad; white space, far from being a design tool, is taken up by the old-fashioned fillers papers used to complete columns with, things like, "While a college professor, Albert Einstein never wore socks to his classes" and "Bananas breathe."

Journalism has "overreacted to the challenge" of USA Today-type design, Harvey says. "Readers see through those things. They're smarter than newspaper professionals think they are."

The future of the Gleam, like many near-legendary family owned weeklies, remains unclear; right now, no young Harvey is interested in carrying it on. One hopes it will not only endure, but prevail, the way Porter facetiously forecast long ago. When Guntersville readers "behold/the dying sun's last beam," he wrote, "they'll believe it when they read it/in the Advertiser-Gleam."