Mum recently visited regional SA and brought home a copy of the Milang Community News ($1.50). Besides being a bookworm (and by extension, paperworm), she says on little country jaunts, one picks up the local rag to see what’s going on.

Among the local news and gardening club ads was this gem:

I love a good historical fact, and this one’s fascinating- the history of  ‘saved by the bell‘, ‘dead ringer‘ and ‘graveyard shift‘. I can’t see myself ever needing to know it – maybe some randomly coincidental quiz night question – or Google ‘origin of phrase saved by the bell’, but it’s still a great tidbit I’ll be filing away up top. Kudos, Mervyn Hopgood.

I wonder what the Milang Community News readership is…I imagine it’s put out by a tiny yet dedicated staff (including The Editor). Community news digests like Milang’s are popular in regional Australia (some are online, too)…I read an article last year about local news — for The Guardian‘s ‘Greenslade Blog’ section, former journo Fran Collingham wrote, “Local people do, on the whole, still trust their local newspaper (more than they trust the national media) to tell them what’s really going on in their neighbourhood, and at a time when they can choose hundreds of different sources that can give them a version of what’s going locally, the role of a local newspaper in sorting out the nonsense from the real story is absolutely vital.”

No doubt, Fran, no doubt.