Emporia, Kansas is a small city on Route 50 between Topeka and Wichita that was at one time known throughout America because of the editor of its newspaper, William Allen White. A young reporter and editorial writer, White borrowed $3,000 in 1895 and bought the Emporia Gazette, where he remained for the rest of his life. His editorials tying local concerns to national and international events were widely read, and he became a Pulitzer Prize winner and an adviser to presidents.
Kansas, at the heart of the country, was also a center for journalistic enterprise. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the state had more than 200 independent newspapers, almost all of them in small cities and towns. “Kansas has always been known as a testing ground of thought,” wrote Andy Taylor, editor of the Montgomery County Chronicle, in photographer Jeremiah Ariaz’s monograph, The Kansas Mirror.
White, a progressive Republican who was committed to racial equality, was considered one of America’s most illustrious journalists. In 1924, he ran for governor because the other two candidates had been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. White came in last.
Ariaz, who comes from a small Kansas town, has been crisscrossing his home state for several years, taking pictures of newspaper offices. He’s photographed 127 newsrooms so far. One of the most arresting images displayed at his talk last week at the Provincetown Commons — sponsored by our Local Journalism Project — was of the Emporia Gazette’s newsroom.
An earlier image of the Gazette newsroom is filled with reporters, typewriters, stacks of papers, and, on the back wall, a huge world map under which all are working — eloquent testimony to the way local journalists can feel part of a global community. In Ariaz’s photo from 2022, the place is abandoned. Everything is gone except the map on the wall.
Ariaz had arrived in Emporia shortly after the Gazette closed down. His photographs of the empty building are heartbreaking: the vacant darkroom with ink-spattered walls, the newspaper’s bound archives in disintegrating stacks, a ghostly corridor with a portrait of William Allen White on the wall.
Many of the newspaper offices Ariaz has documented have closed. Kansas, like the rest of America, has seen its local papers decimated. A new study has found that one of every three counties in the U.S. doesn’t have the equivalent of even one full-time local reporter.
We’ve all heard the statistics, but Ariaz’s photos tell the story much more powerfully.
There is one photograph I recall just as vividly. It’s of a newsroom with sunlight streaming through big windows. In it, a publisher and her son are at work under a giant blue and green map of the world. He has come home to Kansas from New York City to take on the project of bringing their local newspaper into the next generation.
Will young writers ever leave what one of our former journalism fellows called “a center of ambition” to live at the arty end of a peninsula of sand? If we could find homes for a few, it might not be such a bad idea.
