Word: couriers
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...reporter was Mary Ellen Gale '62, a slim brunette who quit her job on the Philiadelphia Bulletin 18 months ago to work for the Southern Courier. As with the Courier's other seven reporters (all of them in their late teens to mid-twenties), her job is to look in on events that no other newspaper in Alabama would deign to cover -- demonstrations by civil rights organizations, plans of anti-poverty agencies, racial killings, piecemeal gains in integration, and the oddities of Alabama life that are galling to Negroes but to which whites are generally oblivious...
...Courier (circulation: 20,000 a week) was the brainchild of two rights-minded veterans of a summer in Mississippi. The two, former CRIMSON editors Ellen Lake '66 and Peter Cummings '66, envisioned a network of five state-wide weekly newspapers in five Deep South states. But that would have taken $75,000 to get going, and months of letter-writing, phone calls, and collections around Harvard produced only $35,000. They picked Alabama, where civil rights groups were planning massive voter registration campaigns to unseat Gov. George Wallace...
Since its first issue rolled off the presses in July, 1965, the Courier, in decided to settle for one paper, and the face of perpetual financial crisis and rapid turnover of its mini-staff, has never missed a week. Young reporters driving long distances late at night have demolished Courier cars; business managers have thrown up their hands at the Courier'S book-keeping-by-memory system and stalked out of its two-room headquarters in a downtown Montgomery office building, never to return. But while steadily losing money (advertising and sales pay only a fraction...
MOST OF the Courier's readers are rural Negroes in the Black Belt of Alabama and Mississippi (during the Meredith March from Memphis to Jackson last summer, the Courier distributed free copies along the route, received letters asking for reporters and subscriptions, and happily supplied both). Few people want their copies mailed; they prefer to pay a dime each time the six-page full-sized paper is delivered to their doorstep. The Courier buses papers out to dozens of local distributors--housewives, civil rights leaders, retired steelworkers--who mail back the paper's share of the money collected, as well...
...intensely loyal readers, many of whom are all but illiterate and most of whom read nothing else, the Courier has developed a peculiar journalese that wavers between first-grade primer and Time magazine style. Efforts to render complex political shenanigans comprehensible lead to headlines like "Who's Doing What to Whom in Phenix City?" An interview with a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor last year contained this passage: "He sprinkled the crackers into his soup. Not too many crackers, and not too few. It was a middle-of-the-road sort of sprinkle...