Hot Sentinel Record Reflection

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Over the course of the semester I have been analyzing the content of my community's newspaper the Hot Springs Sentinel Record based upon my reading in the book. Before I took this class I was clueless of the world of community journalism, I have learned so much about it now and have a great deal of appreciation for community papers. The hard work and dedication that is put into community newspapers by their staff, surpasses that of any big city, large circulation newspaper, in my opinion. Due to the smaller audience of community papers, details are of greater importance, the struggle of deciding when to print stories even if it means offending certain people is much greater, and the obligation of producing a quality paper every single time is held at a higher standard. Based off of the knowledge I have gained from this course over all I do not believe the Hot Springs Sentinel Record exemplifies what it truly means to be a community newspaper. Beginning with the quality of the newspaper, it is lacking in several important areas. …show more content…

As I just discussed they do not cover enough local news so no one in the community that I’ve ever heard of, has relied upon the paper to know what is going on in the community or found importance in making sure they get every edition of the paper. The main goal of a community newspaper is to let it’s readers know what is happening in their community and the Hot Springs Sentinel Record fails at doing that. For readers the layout of the paper is a chaotic mess and frustrating to read, as difficult as redoing the layout of a newspaper may be, for the sake of the reader my community paper needs to do so. It makes no impact online either, it is not updated often enough, the layout is worse than the layout of the paper, and the content they choose to put online is hardly ever