Jim Hightower, a Texas populist with liberal leanings as big as the Lone Star State, can pack a lot of truth in 300 or so words.

A recent column by Hightower is a prime example. It talked about how corporations located far, far away have hollowed out the heart and soul of local newspapers that they have snapped up over the years.

Businesses, including newspapers, have to make money in order to exist. There is nothing inherently evil about that. But in words that Hightower might type, corporate ownership by and large tends to be a horse of a different color.

The Ceres Courier — along with the Turlock Journal, Oakdale Leader, Westside Index, Gustine Press-Standard, Escalon Times, Riverbank News, Manteca Bulletin and 209 Magazine — are locally owned by Hank and Kelly Vander Veen.

Their company — 209 Multimedia — is also in a partnership that launched a weekly newspaper called The Westside Express that serves Los Banos, Dos Palos and Firebaugh. That is on top of having a printing press in Manteca and not relying on a large corporate facility in the Bay Area where the Modesto Bee is now printed.

Our press also prints 15 other newspapers that are locally owned publications in places such as Dixon, Gridley, Carmichael, West Sacramento, Citrus Heights, Rancho Cordova, Madera, Rio Linda and Calaveras County among others.

Every penny you spend on a newspaper subscription or an advertisement stays in the communities we serve. Those people — press crews, delivery people, inserters, advertising representatives, reporters, editors, paginators that build pages, support staff and even the publishers — all live here.

Not only do they spend their money here, but more importantly they have roots here. 

And while having a local impact economically was a part of Hightower’s point, it was only a sliver of it.

Highwater was zeroing in on content.

Having worked on newspapers — all locally owned, by the way, except for a side gig with Associated Press covering the Sacramento Kings for over five years during the past 51 years — I’ve gotten an earful of what people think about what I do every day and what they read in the pages of their newspaper.

Some good, some bad. Sometimes feedback comes via a phone call but most of the time it’s when I’m shopping at places like Target or Food-4-less, dining at El Jardin, walking my dogs, attending a community function like a parade or when I’m volunteering with an event like the community Thanksgiving dinner that I missed this year due to a conflict with work.

We are invested in the community not just because of our jobs but because we live here as do people we care about. They run the gamut from family and friends to neighbors and those we come across during the course of a day that live or work here as well.

That concern is reflected on the pages of the Courier.

The Jan. 6 edition is an example.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is about as slow as you can get for news.

Yet there were stories about:

• Pat Crane retiring as a Ceres Police captain;

• Two flu deaths reported in Stanislaus County;

• How the city of Ceres is prepared for wind and more rain;

• Applications accepted for the Measure H Committee;

• Ceres High senior wins third place in the Congressional App Challenge;

• Assorted crimes committed in Ceres;

• The Ceres Chamber preparing for the annual banquet on Jan. 20;

• How athletes from the high schools in Ceres are performing.

There were also letters from your neighbors — like Alvaro Franco — weighing in on local issues.

You will also find columns that don’t fit some dictated corporate view. 

The year-end slow down isn’t exactly the best representation of what the Courier strives to do.

But we make an effort to make sure story selections that have the greatest relevance to the Ceres community.

If you happen to subscribe to the nearby daily that is corporate owned — the Modesto Bee— you might notice a thing or two that make them different than the Courier.

It is extremely rare to find a front page in the Courier that isn’t 100 percent local. That’s not the case with the Bee.

Sometimes we have more local stories just on the front page than either have in their entire newspapers. This is not a criticism per se, but that decision was made by how the corporations that own those newspapers chose to operate them.

And in terms of non-local sports, you can find much more extensive coverage that happened the week before when you open our sports section.

This is possible based on decisions made by local owners who didn’t decide to outsource the building of pages to Kansas City or Hong Kong or to get rid of the printing press to reduce costs and increase their profit margin.

It makes a difference in not just what you get in local and professional sports as well as general news but also local events. You can pick up the Courier after a council meeting to see just exactly what is being done with your tax dollars as well as decisions being made that may eventually impact your life.

That fact that can be done is because we are not only locally owned but have publishers who are committed to the concept of local journalism and not focused on squeezing the proverbial turnip for every last cent they can in profit to please Wall Street hedge fund investors.

We are not riding the high horse because of how the world has evolved when it comes to newspapers over the last 20-plus years. Instead, we are simply riding the same horse that others who have worked delivering community journalism have done since the first edition of the Courier was published 113 years ago.

Our world is Ceres and the other communities we cover.

It is not Wall Street, Sacramento, or Washington, D.C.

This column is the opinion of Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Courier or 209 Multimedia.