The Omaha World-Herald is a horrible right-wing rag, a paper that would seem to confirm the darkest impressions east-coast elitists have of Flyover Land as a hotbed of rock-ribbed conservatism and barely-coded racism.
However, it is a bit of a rarity in these times: it's an independently published newspaper. Lacking the deep pockets of a national chain, it still has the resources to fill its staff with "lifestyle" columnists. It has music critics, film critics, even a scribe assigned to the local bar scene. None of their work is particularly distinguished, but it's competent, and at least it's there.
My hometown paper, The Des Moines Register, a former liberal firebrand reduced to giving free hand jobs to Big Business, is owned by Gannett. While God knows that's not a name associated with quality, it would seem to suggest The Register has some sort of solid financial backing.
But it doesn't. Budgets have been slashed left and right, and nowhere is this more obvious than the paper's arts coverage. A year or two ago, The Register dumped its film critic, Jeffrey Bruner, and more recently, lost its music critic, Kyle Munson. Both of these guys wrote reasonably well about their assigned topics, and more importantly, brought some local flavor to their reviews.
Des Moines isn't really a cultural wasteland, but it's hard for any local art or cultural scene to flourish without some sort of help from the local press. These days, The Register cobbles together its arts coverage by parroting press releases and running wire stories, thus assuring that regional artists, musicians and theater groups receive either no attention or only the attention they themselves are able to drum up. There is nobody there to champion their work. In some ways, this is worse than an actively hostile environment; this is absolute indifference.
