What is a Town Crier, and what should it be?

BY MEGHAN GOTH | LINK nky MANAGING EDITOR

Do you remember the Town Crier?

It was a beloved feature in the Kentucky Post that included an array of items like birth announcements, engagement announcements, things that were going on around town and all sorts of other information.

It also included a crime blotter. This included DUIs, divorces, and arrests for everything from robbery to murder.

According to an August 2022 Cincinnati Magazine article, town criers were originally people who charged others to shout information on street corners so that normal people could find out what was going on in their communities.

The notion of a Town Crier evolved and eventually found its way into print in the Kentucky Post. It was seen as a way to find out what’s going on around town. Some of it was positive. Some of it was messy. Most of it hit that gossipy part of our brains that just wants to know what’s happening outside of our own small circles.

When LINK announced we would be resurrecting the Town Crier, many of you showed your excitement.

Many were disappointed in what you found. The current iteration of the Town Crier is a far cry – pun intended – from the Crier of years past.

While we changed the Crier for a specific reason, we may not have been clear enough about why. We also hear you, and we want to keep tweaking this feature of our weekly paper until we get it right.

But first, here’s why we didn’t just replicate the Post model at LINK.

“It was a different era,” said Michele Day, a journalism professor and student media advisor at Northern Kentucky University.

When Day worked as a night city editor at the Post, she copy edited the Crier before it went to print. Day is also on LINK nky’s editorial board, and helps us talk through decisions like this as we think about how to cover news.

“The big issue,” Day said, “is that if you’re not going to follow up on every item, what’s going to happen with that? If somebody is charged, they are innocent until proven guilty. But a town crier is just putting it out there and the assumption is often that they did it.”

For example, Day said, what about what happens later? What if the charges were dropped or it turned out police arrested the wrong person?

Day said that the process of putting out the Town Crier was the responsibility of multiple reporters who spent huge chunks of their days going to courthouses to compile information.

If the Post, which at the time had close to 50 reporters, didn’t have the bandwidth to follow up on each of the items mentioned in the Town Crier, then we at LINK certainly don’t. While we are growing rapidly, we still only have 10 full-time editorial staff.

And we cannot, in good conscience, report a tiny blip in someone’s life – or the circumstances surrounding it – that may or may not have actually happened without knowing we can responsibly follow up on it later.

Here’s what we can do.

We can include any public meetings that allow people to weigh in on the decisions that affect their communities.

We can include the fun stuff: Birth announcements, wedding announcements, engagements., community events and celebrations.

And we can include some of the mess: Did a truck carrying 10,000 jars of peanut butter spill and close the road near your house for 12 hours? Maybe there is a stop sign in the neighborhood that everyone seems to disregard, or lawn furniture that mysteriously appeared in the yard after a storm and the owner is yet to be found?

We can also include the weird stuff: How about the coyote that everyone in the neighborhood has seen drinking out of their bird bath? Maybe you snapped a pic of a raccoon on top of a light pole (I see you, Alexandria). Perhaps your neighbor has the absolute best holiday display that the public just must see. Maybe there was a celebrity sighting at the restaurant where you worked.

So, please, stick with us and help us make the Town Crier into something resembling its old self, albeit without the irresponsible crime coverage.

Here’s how you can submit items to the Town Crier: Email towncrier@linknky.com. Include as much information as you can, along with any pictures that accompany your item.

And here are some examples of the things we are looking for: