Small Town Publicity—Good or Bad?

Yesterday, a newspaper reporter from a small town asked me about recent publicity that several communities in the Plains states have generated with free land giveaways for people who have moved there. She indicated that several families had taken advantage of the offer in her town of 1,000, but that the columnist Bob Greene had written some very negative things about the offers, calling them desperate attempts on behalf of the towns.

I told her that I thought that the free land could make a lot of sense, depending upon the town. I thought that the risk/reward ratio was in favor of the towns and that the publicity, even if negative, was probably beneficial. I told her, “When you are one of 15,800 small towns in the USA, any publicity is probably good publicity.”

She indicated that her town had gotten some people to move to the community as a result of the offer. She cited an example of one retired couple that had moved to the town and later had several of their children and families move there also.
My wife gave me a slightly different perspective last night. She was reading the April, 2005 Smithsonian magazine, pointing out an article about the Scopes Monkey Trial which took place 80 years. The trial put tiny Dayton, TN (population 2,000 at the time) in the national news during the entire summer of 1925. The trial, which electrified the country at the time, started as a stunt to put tiny Dayton on the map.

When Tennessee passed a law that made teaching evolution illegal and the ACLU announced that it would defend anyone who would challenge the statute, Dayton’s business leaders decided to recruit a volunteer. They found their candidate in John Scopes, a new teacher who had recently graduated from the University of Kentucky. Although he had never taught evolution up to that point, he agreed to start doing so and as they say “the rest is history.” While the publicity probably didn’t help tiny Dayton in the long term, for a short period of time they were the center of the news universe.