Liberation journalism: a veteran editor says farewell to the world of dailies and finds happiness running a weekly in the home of baseball's hall of fame.

I'm telling you this because coming out of the newsroom, much of the work--ad sales, distribution, bookkeeping--was new to me. It was exciting to find that the survival skills developed by the harassed and haggard daily editor--strategizing, adapting, budgeting, schmoozing and occasionally acting on a creative idea or two--were transferable.

Selling ads, I learned when a salesperson left me in the lurch, is a lot like reporting; instead of extracting information, you're looking to extract revenue. You need the same self-confidence, diplomacy and occasional bluster. To set an interviewee or a shopkeeper at ease, you need to establish common ground.

But none of that speaks to the joy of weekly newspapering.

Foremost, this is pure journalism. You can cover what you want the way you think it should be covered. You can free yourself from the corrosive union that's developed between journalism and marketing--two warring animals--in the past quarter-century. To the degree you can tolerate the consequences, you can speak truth to power.

Cooperstown is content-rich--the Baseball Hall of Fame, Glimmerglass Opera, headquarters of nine-county Bassett Healthcare, are all worthy of an independent beat--but virtually every town everywhere is populated with interesting people facing challenging issues. All news, as Tip O'Neill would have said if he had been an editor, is local.

As I write this, I'm looking at the February 8 edition. The lead story is Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) leading the charge to turn around Major League Baseball's decision to cancel the Hall of Fame game, a nearly 70-year tradition. There's a story about Larry's Barber Shop entering its 35th year, headlined "Norman Rockwell Lives."

The Cooperstown Central girls' basketball team has ended an unprecedented perfect season. The Village of Cooperstown issued warnings to 70 homeowners to clear their sidewalks after a recent ice storm or face fines--all but six complied.

Everyone is scouring the parks to find the 2008 Winter Carnival Medallion and win $500, a prize provided by the Freeman's Journal. And Charlie Vascellaro has brought home a grapefruit signed by Sammy Sosa; Charlie had it freeze-dried to preserve it and is asking $3,000 for the odd souvenir.

There have been meatier issues. One is community resistance to windmills--3,200 are planned upstate; 75 were to be within sight of James Fenimore Cooper's Glimmerglass. Cooperstown Dreams Park, a youth baseball tournament venue that brings 55,000 to the neighborhood each summer, hasn't been a very good neighbor, most recently installing nine septic fields without permits.

And people seem to be reading what we're printing. Circulation is 2,500, up from 1,800 when we bought it. At this level, content makes a difference. Most weeks, we have more than 50 people identified by name in photos, and they have parents, grandparents, spouses, kids, friends, etc. It doesn't take long before we can "touch" all of the 10,000 people in the towns around the lake.

I see mastheads with nine or 10 or a dozen people on an editorial board, and shudder. How that results in coherent opinions mystifies me--usually, it doesn't. Is there any less pleasant task than having to write an editorial you disagree with? That is intellectual heavy lifting, indeed. Been there, done that.

Now, editorial writing is a pleasure. The idea is to digest the facts. Come to a conclusion. And write it in as lively and convincing a way possible. Go figure. An imperfect opinion is better than pabulum--the readers set us straight the following week. (We ran 300 letters in 2007.)

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Often, you can put a price tag on an editorial decision. One potentially major advertiser, for instance, wants access to the news columns as well. That was a $2,000 decision to say no.

The jingoists are right: Freedom isn't free. I can put a dollar value on what it's cost me to exercise the First Amendment--but it's been worth every nickel.

And the paper is profitable, we're making a living and in five years we'll have the note paid off.

In January, James O'Shea was ousted as editor of the Los Angeles Times for refusing newsroom budget cuts, the latest of so many there and at newspapers around the country. And that's just one piece of the malaise. There is an alternative, an exciting one, where you can practice, mostly unfettered, whatever type of journalism you believe in.

My first newspaper job back in 1973 was for the Bridgeport Post in Connecticut. A few weeks in, I was sent up to Danbury to fill in for a vacationing reporter. I got a tip that an oil tank at the local distributor--a big advertiser--had leaked fuel into the Still River.

I got the story and, as I was about to file it, the phone rang. It was our crusty--and revered; I revered him as much as anyone--city editor. I was on the regional desk; we'd never spoken before.

"There's no story," he said.

I started to explain what had transpired. He repeated, "There's no story."

Timid lad though I was, I replied, "I've written the story. I'll file it and you decide whether to run it or not." The story never ran and no one ever mentioned it to me again.

That was the first time I considered quitting the business I loved and continue to love today. But I thought to myself, stay in the game. Do what you can in the service of Truth and Democracy, and let the rest slide.

Little did I know that I didn't have to live that way. I wish I had discovered 35 years ago what I know now.

Jim Kevlin (jkevlin@thefreemansjournal.com) has spent 35 years on newspapers in the Northeast, ranging from the weekly Lakeville Journal in Connecticut to the Buffalo News. He was the editor of dailies in Pennsylvania and Connecticut for 15 years before he and wife M.J. purchased the Freeman's Journal in May 2006.

RELATED ARTICLE: Now It Began

Judge William Cooper's supporters, Federalists all, sought to create "The Village of Cooperstown" in 1807. But Cooper's archrival, Elihu Phinney, the Whig publisher of the Otsego Herald, foiled him, and the new municipality was named "The Village of Otsego" instead.

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Nursing a grudge, Cooper, Cooperstown's founder and father of novelist James Fenimore Cooper, launched the Impartial Observer on October 22 of the following year, just in time to weigh in on that November's elections. Since the impetus for the newspaper was purely partisan, the name became the butt of jokes in local taverns and it was soon rechristened the Cooperstown Federalist.

Cooper died in 1809; the village was renamed "Cooperstown" three years later. In 1818, the newspaper, under Publisher and future Congressman John H. Prentiss, underwent a political conversion and was renamed the Freeman's Journal. Supporters of Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic-Republican Party (today's Democrats), were then known as "freemen."

Prentiss owned the newspaper for half the 19th century; Samuel Shaw--"Be Just, and Fear Not" was his motto--did so in the second half.

The 20th century brought consolidation, as the Cherry Valley Gazette, the Richfield Springs Mercury and other newspapers were acquired.

For a period, the company published both the Democratic Freeman's Journal and the Republican Otsego Farmer. The story goes that when one editor went on vacation, the other editor would write two editorials, from each party's point of view.

After a fire destroyed the newspaper's building and pressroom at Main and Pioneer in 1964, the weekly went through a half-dozen owners in the last three decades of the 20th century. Jim and M.J. Kevlin bought the paper on May 30, 2006.

--J.K.