Bender had posted a notice about the ordinance. These latter areas are what researchers call news deserts, and Jones County, one researcher told me, is a classic example. Around fifteen hundred American counties have just one paper, usually a weekly another two hundred counties are without a newspaper altogether. The vast majority of those that have folded are weekly papers and other non-dailies. has lost one in four of its newspapers in the last fifteen years. At this point, not even its publisher is quite willing to call it a paper. But that outlet has faded over a period of years, first becoming a regional insert delivered with other newspapers, and gradually ceasing to print much in the way of substantive local journalism. It used to have the Jones Post, a weekly founded in 1976. Pollocksville is situated in Jones County, and most people would tell you that Jones County doesn’t have a newspaper. He asked if anyone in the audience would like to comment on it. Jay Bender, who’s been the mayor of Pollocksville for nearly four decades, has a solid helmet of gray hair and a careful drawl. Among the first orders of business was a proposed flood-damage ordinance, one of many responses to Florence that the board has considered in the past year. On a Tuesday evening in November, Pollocksville’s five town commissioners gathered there, sitting on a raised platform beneath fluorescent lights and an American flag, to which they and the seven residents who had come to the meeting-a typical number of attendees-pledged allegiance. The commissioners’ meetings are now held in a former pharmacy across the street from the Dollar General store. The train depot was nearly destroyed, along with town records that dated back to the nineteen-twenties. In September, 2018, Hurricane Florence flooded the Trent the water rose as high as ten feet downtown, severely damaging dozens of structures in Pollocksville. For a long time, the commissioners of Pollocksville, a town of three hundred or so people in the far eastern part of North Carolina, held their monthly public meetings in a century-old former train depot on Main Street, near the Trent River.
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