Otterblog

When it comes to car factories, North Carolina appears to be a perennial bridesmaid. As we noted today, Toyota chose Tupelo, Miss. (yes, it’s the whole Elvis thing) over a bunch of other places, including a site in Davidson County.

Despite Detroit’s problems, car factories are still silver tunas, especially Toyota plants. One of my favorite sites, the Rural Blog, which is run out of the University of Kentucky journalism school has an interesting piece on the role the newspaper in Northeast Mississippi played in the recruitment effort. The paper is called the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, and it’s goal for the past 50 years has been to tie that corner of the state together into a viable region for growth.

Our regionalism efforts here aren’t quite so robust or consistent, but the competing counties do work together much better than in the past, and it’s becoming more the rule than the exception.

The news pages of newspapers (as opposed to the opinion pages) have always done a balancing act when it comes to being a part of economic recruitment. I look at the Journal’s coverage of Dell’s move here, or more recently, The Charlotte Observer’s reporting on the Google incentives. We certainly understand that growth means—or has the potential to mean—more readers and the like, but being a cheerleader is a difficult role for many of us.

One other interesting tidbit about the NEMJ is that it is a rarity, an independent newspaper that is owned by a foundation, in this case the Create Foundation, which does community work in that part of the state. Private owners can be just as demanding as public shareholders, but as newspapers look for new ownership models in this day and age, other ways of doing business are worth considering.