17 August 2023
WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) – A police raid Friday thrust Marion County, a small county about an hour outside of Wichita, into national headlines this week. In the paper’s first issue since the incident, staff felt they had to address what everyone is talking about.
Mic McGuire is one of thousands of new subscribers to the Marion County Record. He drove from Emporia, a city an hour away from Marion, to pick up his first copy Wednesday.
“This is big news, you know, for Kansas, for anywhere, but definitely for Marion, Kansas,” McGuire said. “This is pretty big news.”
“This is unprecedented,” said Michelle Avis, a new subscriber from Hillsboro. “It’s astounding that something like this could happen in a 2,000 population, small town.”
Locally, the paper has also seen a lot of support.
“Even people who have been here who have been hostile toward the newspaper or toward me personally have all come up and said how supportive they are,” said staff writer Phyllis Zorn.
The paper’s publisher Eric Meyer says he wants to bring people’s focus back to local issues.
“We would have probably written about the budget situation in Marion this week, which we think is the topic people should be talking about right now,” Meyer said.
The paper had fewer stories than normal this week, according to Meyer. He said he hopes to return to more enterprising stories in the future.