What 'Gorgeous' Bodega Bay Is Missing

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A resident of Bodega Bay, Calif., Peter Laufer is an avid BusinessWeek reader and a veteran journalist and published author whose next book is titled The Dangerous World of Butterflies. Sherry Loeser

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The Light was owned and operated for more than a generation by iconoclastic David Mitchell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who nurtured (and often irritated) his community with the paper. When he sold it to newcomer Robert Plotkin for half a million dollars, some of the natives were incensed with the resulting changes, insisting Plotkin showed more interest in drawing attention to himself than in reporting local news.

But a newspaper war an hour south down Highway One does nothing to fill the void here in Bodega Bay, and the slap-dash Navigator Web site is no replacement for a running commentary on local life produced with ink on paper. A hard copy weekly newspaper sits on the kitchen table for days and is read and reread. Stories from it are torn out and stuck on refrigerators or sent to distant friends and relatives. Back issues are stored in libraries. Articles can be pinned up, and debated, in diners or the post office.

We can't know what's going on in our midst if no one is lurking around, asking questions, and compiling reports. There is no dearth of news here, news that's important to us but not worth the bother for the Press Democrat headquartered almost an hour east in our county seat Santa Rosa, a newspaper with no beat reporter assigned to the Sonoma County coast.

Who Watches the Watchers?

Case in point: We are still reeling from two recent, unsolved murders. Without a newspaper, who is providing oversight of the sheriff's investigations? Our fishing economy is in crisis—what is being done to restore the fishery? Construction started on a long delayed and controversial housing project. Who is watching to make sure the developer adheres to his permit? What's going on at our Coast Guard station? Who's tracking the results of our Fire Board and Utility District meetings? What goes on in the windowless Grange Hall? Who is preaching what up at the Union Church? Where is the communal record of our births and deaths, our marriages and high school graduations?

A town without a newspaper is a town in crisis. A community newspaper, as Hack laments when he talks about closing the Navigator, "teaches a community how to talk to itself." He cites California's car culture, the hours we spend in front of the television, and our tech-enabled tendency to exist in personal cocoons as examples of our growing isolation and alienation. "There are a gazillion things that work against community," he says, "and a newspaper is one of the things that offsets lack of community."

A town's character is influenced by its physical location and its architecture. But its mythology and sense of self develops as events occur. And we can't all be everywhere talking with everyone about what's going on around here. We need a witness to chronicle those events, to put them into historical perspective. Newspaper reporters and editors perform those critical community-building roles. We need a curmudgeonly editor-in-chief poking around and commenting on other people's business—someone who loves Bodega Bay and prints stories that help us question and understand ourselves.

BusinessWeek may praise Bodega Bay as "a gorgeous town" and a "very good spot for wine aficionados." But without a local newspaper, we're just another pretty spot on the road.

A resident of Bodega Bay, Calif., Peter Laufer is an avid BusinessWeek reader, veteran journalist, and published author whose books include Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq. His next book, The Dangerous World of Butterflies, is slated for publication in 2009.