Peter Crabtree photos of rural newsrooms

I learned about Peter Crabtree’s work when my co-worker, Tim, yelled to me across the office, “Hey, Shawn, come look at these.” On his screen were black-and-white photographs of small-town newsrooms — the cluttered desks, a news staffer taking notes with a phone cradled under her chin, inexpensive wood paneling, police scanners, a writer intently looking at a computer as if her words might pop up on her screen any moment. We scrolled through Crabtree’s photographs and fell to telling stories about our own experiences in newsrooms. The people, the equipment, and the lived-in look even the newest spaces invariably had. It turned out that I actually interned at one of the papers that Crabtree featured, the Santa Fe New Mexican, back in 2000. Though newspapers have had a rough go of it lately, there’s still plenty of print journalism in small towns. There are an estimated 7,500 papers with under 30,000 in circulation in the U.S., according to a Stanford report. I think the ones that thrive have do so because their focus is local. To some extent they provide information that residents can’t get anywhere else. That doesn’t make them invulnerable, but it does perhaps make them irreplaceable. We like these photos so much, we’re going to run some today and then use the rest of Crabtree’s collection as a recurring feature for several weeks. It’s our way of calling attention to an important small-town institution and the people who put out the news.