The last bastion of collective reality — and your role in saving it

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Community newspapers are the last bastion of collective reality. And this publication, The Iowa Mercury, makes our work available to newspapers, because, after all, I am a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman.

Here is why YOU should spend the $7 a month to turn your Iowa Mercury subscription into a paid one. (Profound THANK YOU if you are paid.) There's an urgency here. We cover what other media, centered on the coasts or urban areas of Iowa, choose to ignore or can't afford to staff.

We can build trust and reality back from community newspapers up, not The New York Times and presidential candidates down.

We have no pay wall at The Iowa Mercury — and any newspaper in America can access and publish these rural stories at no cost. As news deserts proliferate in rural America, truth itself is buried with the local newspapers or left with little chance to survive in the hands of the “ghost papers” that roam the landscape of misinformation and creeping dystopia.

What's more, The Iowa Mercury has a national audience with a big reach into rural areas of a fractured America — Iowa, of course specifically. We have trust with the rural audience. We can break through the walls of tribalism from time to time.

Please graduate from a free to paid subscriber so The Iowa Mercury can expand its coverage, get more truth into the rural bloodstream.

Content in local papers, the news organizations in smaller, rural communities, readers know to be true because they have seen it.

The obituaries. They know their friend or former high school classmate is dead.

The sports. They were at the game, or heard about it at work.

They know the score, as the paper reported, was 14-10.

The local government. The report on the road work on Adams Street is true because the reader had to detour from home to work, and back, for a month now.

Stories or ads, just content in general, on state and national news accrues credibility by proximity to the local truth.

Local truth is verified by the eyes. In person.

We are here. On the ground. In rural America. Fighting for the truth. The truth must win.

There’s more.

Often, local issues, while informed by national political polarization, are driven by other factors that connect people across that divide on issues, missions and projects they can see with their own eyes.

The Iowa Mercury is designed to lift local rural news coverage.

Finally, the 100th paid subscriber to the Iowa Mercury will get a free dinner with the founder. Read here about some potential restaurants in Iowa where this dinner could take place.

Here’s the deal with an honest and final appeal … Mostly, I just want to keep covering rural Iowa. $7 a month from more readers would help. Thanks for indulging the pitch and plea.

(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )