LUMBERTON, Miss.—After years without a community newspaper, a new initiative is taking root in Lumberton to help fill a communication gap. The Lumberton Post is a grassroots print newspaper created to share updates and information beyond social media. The two-page paper began circulating March 1, with 100 copies placed in local storefronts.
John Maroney, executive director of the Lumberton Main Street Association, helped launch the project and said it is meant to make local information easier to find and share, especially for residents who don’t use social media or lack reliable internet access.
“We were not dynamic enough as the Lumberton Main Street Association. We pretty much did everything on Facebook,” Maroney said. “We feel like we have really good information, and we want to get good information out there to people.”
Maroney said the idea gained traction as more residents raised the same concern: It was hard to know what was happening in town and where to find reliable updates in one place.
That is the problem Leanna Dreher said she kept running into after she moved to Lumberton.
“I never knew what was going on in town because there was no dedicated local radio or TV station, and there was no local newspaper, so I’d drive by the community center and see lots of cars and wonder, ‘What’s going on there?’ But how would I know, right?” Dreher said.
Dreher responded by starting a Facebook group called The Lumberton Post—the namesake for the newspaper and a place where residents could share announcements, questions and everyday updates. The group grew into a central hub for community information, drawing nearly 6,000 members.
“I said, ‘Just consider this your little local newspaper. You can put births in here, weddings in here—whatever you want. You know, put your businesses in here so that people will know what’s going on in town,’” Dreher said.
Even as the group grew, Dreher said she kept thinking about the people it didn’t reach and how much of the town’s daily life depended on someone seeing the right post at the right time.
That is where the print version came in. Dreher said moving the information into paper copies made the effort feel more tangible and created more chances to talk with residents in person about what they needed and wanted included.
For Maroney, the push into print was less about creating something flashy and more about building a consistent way to share everyday updates that can be easy to miss.
“Everyone wants to tune in to the homicides or whatever happens crime-wise, but the real stories are about what’s really happening in the communities,” Maroney said. “The community journalism aspect—focusing on the good news, the real stories, not just the terrible things that are happening, but some of the good news.”
Maroney said the concept came quickly together, but the work was in deciding what the paper should be and what it should deliver each month.
“We just started going through templates and ideas. What do we want to actually include in the newspaper? What kind of information do we want? Do we want it to be about businesses, about grants? So, we spent time figuring out what we actually want for the cover and back page, then sliding in photos, writing stories and reaching out to people,” Maroney said.
Dreher said she began reaching out across town to gather event information and updates residents could use.
Maroney and Dreher said they plan to continue building the paper month by month, with the next edition set for April 1. They said they also want to print more copies and widen distribution as more residents ask for it.
Eventually, Dreher said she hopes it grows into something that can be printed professionally.
“The dream is that we will get to a place where we can have it printed professionally,” Dreher said. “It will look better. It will read better. We just have to take the copy and go take it somewhere and say, make this into a nice little paper for us.”
Although she covered the cost of the first round of copies, Dreher said the project’s growth depends on local support, especially if the paper expands beyond a short monthly edition.
“Lumberton Main Street can’t afford the paper and the ink to do all those pages for everybody. It gets expensive,” she said.
Maroney said the paper will only last if more people help carry it—from sharing information to contributing stories and community updates.
“There’s going to have to be buy-in. People are going to also have to be passionate about it because it can’t necessarily just be John and Leanna forever,” Maroney said. “Businesses are going to want to have to write stories, and that takes time… and that’s an essential part of the community aspect of it.”
This article first appeared on RHCJC and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
