While trying to brainstorm two newspapers that can be used to compare wedding announcements, I found myself looking back to my experience in Idaho and how different that area was from my hometown, Chicago. This summer I
Interned with the Nez Perce Reservation near Lewiston, Idaho and I discovered in my old backpack a weathered copy of the reservation newspaper, known as the Tac Tito’oqan. During my time there I had written several articles relating to the region’s environmental and social concerns and read it whenever I could. The Tac Tito’oqan differed greatly from my “hometown” newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. This becomes most evident when reading the wedding announcements. In the Tac Tito’oqan, wedding announcements submitted by the readers are long, detailed and personal. Essentially, they are mini biographies about the two people coming together to be married. A small newspaper with limited readership has the room for such detailed announcements because of lack of potential advertisers and writers. The newspaper itself is very personal, less focused on professionalism. The reservation is large for most reservations but the population is still around 5,000. Everyone knows everybody and the few publics that make up the reservation all overlap. When looking at the wedding announcements I wasn’t surprised to see that every couple was not only Native American but they were all Nez Perce Indian. Non-natives do live on the land but their relationship with the tribe is very stressed and therefore they would never read a native newspaper. Compare all of this to the Chicago Tribune. The first noticeable difference is the length of the announcements. All are very short, factual and to the point. It is also important to point out that I read the wedding announcements in the Tribune on their own web page. Not only does the Tac Tito’oqan lack a separate page for wedding announcements, they lack an entire website. The paper is also distributed monthly. The weddings you see are after an entire month has passed by – the immediacy of information is not as vital. As far as those represented in the announcement, the Tribune displays a diverse constituency. The first three announcements are about a Columbian-american couple, a teacher and a venture capitalist, and a national guardsman marrying his high school sweetheart. The Chicago Tribune is a national, metropolitan newspaper and its readership is very large. It represents thousands of different publics. The Tac Tito’oqan represents small, secluded publics that all interrelate within a culturally separate nation.