A Carroll County town lost its local news, so a McDaniel professor started a paper

Jonathan Slade did not set out to become a newspaper journalist again. He grew up in Carroll County and teaches media literacy, television production and script writing in the Department of Communication & Cinema at McDaniel College in Westminster, where he has been a full-time professor for more than two decades.

But sometime around 2018, sitting in Lineboro, Maryland, the small Carroll County town where he's lived since 2001, he noticed the local coverage that once reached his community of roughly 60 homes had disappeared.

"Nobody's covering Lineboro anymore," Slade recalled thinking, in a June appearance on Karen Shaak's podcast "At My Kitchen Table." The regional outlets that used to send reporters, among them the Carroll County Times, the Hanover Evening Sun, the York Daily Record and local radio, had pulled back. So in January 2020, he printed the first issue of the Mason-Dixon Surveyor, a free, quarterly, eight-page tabloid he writes, photographs, and lays out himself at his dining room table.

More than six years later, the paper prints 1,000 copies four times a year and is distributed in about 30 stores across northern Carroll County and southern Pennsylvania, from pharmacies and liquor stores to senior centers and the library. Westminster locations, such as the Carroll Arts Center, often have the paper available.

Slade told Shaak that he named his paper the Mason-Dixon Surveyor rather than the Lineboro anything because the Mason-Dixon Line runs between Lineboro and Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, and the name lets him cover both sides of the border.

On Tuesday, Nov. 10, Slade will bring that experience running a local paper to Westminster as this year's speaker for McDaniel's annual Lumen Lecture, a free talk open to the public at 7 p.m. in the college's Coley Rice Lounge. Hosted by the Lumen Scholars Program under the theme "Embed," the lecture centers on his do-it-yourself paper and the case for local news. Slade laid out the paper's origins and his broader views in a recent podcast interview and in emailed remarks to Westminster Wire.

Slade traces the paper in the podcast interview to a third-grade classroom at William Winchester Elementary School in Westminster, where he finished his work early, and a teacher handed him a ditto, the inked, pre-photocopy duplicating sheet to make a newspaper. He edited his high school and college papers at McDaniel, then pivoted to film, earning a master's in cinematic arts from the University of Southern California and spending 11 years as a producer at Maryland Public Television.

"I started my first newspaper when I was in third grade at William Winchester Elementary, writing it all down on a ditto," Slade said in an email to Westminster Wire. "But I came back to journalism in 2019 when I realized that traditional media outlets in the area were no longer covering my neighborhood and the people I knew. And that's really how the Mason-Dixon Surveyor began, from a curiosity about my own community and how I might be able to tell stories about it that other outlets no longer had the resources to chase down."

When he decided to launch the paper, he taught himself Adobe InDesign and funded it with a modest inheritance after his mother's death, he told Shaak on her podcast. He found the cheapest printer not in Maryland but in Stigler, Oklahoma, which ships the finished issues back by ground. He estimates the paper costs him roughly $3,200 to $3,500 a year, all self-funded; he has turned down advertising because, he said on the podcast, selling and laying out ads would leave no time to report. Asked on the podcast whether he loves the work, Slade was blunt: "No, I don't love it. I love having done it. The doing it is hell."

Distribution runs on neighbors, he said on the podcast. When a reader complained that the first issue was hard to find, Slade tracked down a warehouse in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, that sells retired newspaper vending boxes, bought one, and cemented it into his front yard. To get the paper into stores, he leaned on Mary Kay Mauer, his former high school English teacher, and her husband, George, a retired Manchester butcher who still knew every shopkeeper on his old delivery route and offered to carry copies around the county.

Slade's early plan, he said on the podcast, was a light community zine of fire hall notices and Facebook-lost-pig items. The pandemic changed that. By the second issue, he was writing about residents dying of COVID-19, a local eagle population being poisoned, and a dangerous intersection in town.

"There's a lot more news going on in our small towns, rural villages, and farming communities than you think, but it tends to get crowded out by national and international coverage," Slade told Westminster Wire by email.

His reporting has repeatedly landed on stories larger outlets missed, he told Shaak. At a town council meeting he overheard a reference to PFAS testing, kept asking questions, and found that Hampstead had among the highest levels of the toxic "forever chemicals" in the state, weeks, he said, before the Washington Post reported it. He has covered a proposed high-voltage transmission line routed through Carroll County in 2024 by driving the route and interviewing the farmers and merchants along it, and he wrote about solar energy generation on county farmland by talking to a town councilman and a conservative county commissioner rather than the shouting matches on social media.

Slade said on the podcast that he steers clear of national politics and religion, reasoning that there are plenty of other places to fight about those. His approach, he said, is borrowed from documentary work: point a camera, or a notebook, at people who have never been interviewed before, and report from the field rather than from a desk. He contrasts that with what he calls "churnalism," the practice of lightly rewriting press releases to fill space.

A recurring theme in the conversation with Shaak was Slade's concern about how digital and social media are reshaping attention, especially among the students in his Intro to Media course, which he's taught since 2003. Print journalism, he argued on the podcast, is one of the few media with fact-checking built into its DNA, and other outlets still lean on newspapers as their factual foundation, so the collapse of newspapers erodes accuracy across the board. He cited a Massachusetts Institute of Technology finding that falsehoods travel faster and farther on social media than the truth, and pointed to the "default mode network," the brain's tendency to process experience during unstimulated downtime that constant scrolling crowds out.

On the podcast, he also referenced Jonathan Haidt's book "The Anxious Generation" and research linking the rise of smartphones after 2012 to increases in anxiety and depression among young people. He described a hopeful shift: students arriving from high schools that banned phones are, he said, noticeably more present in his college classroom. He makes a similar case for handwriting notes over typing them, arguing that longhand forces the brain to process information rather than transcribe it.

Despite his worries about the industry, Slade defends the work most newspapers still do. "I believe most newspapers do strive to present a thoughtful, credible, fact-based accounting of a community's challenges and successes," he said by email, "and this sort of old school reporting becomes even more valuable as media continues to devolve into just strangers shouting at each other over the internet."

Slade was careful throughout the podcast interview not to blame students or older readers, framing both as outmatched by well-financed platforms. He tied it back to his own work: the Surveyor, he told Shaak, is his attempt to be present in his community rather than shouting into a screen.

Since 2024, Slade has been filming a documentary about the small-town press, traveling to interview publishers and editors of community papers that have survived a century or more even as regional dailies fold. He told Shaak he has amassed some 54 hours of footage. His conclusion so far echoes his own experience: the papers that endure are woven into the fabric of their communities, not owned by out-of-town venture capital.

It is familiar territory for a seven-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker whose work includes "Historic Barns of Maryland," "Barns of the Susquehanna Valley," the 2012 electric-vehicle road trip he made with his wife, Novia, and the 2019 feature "Made Possible By Viewers Like You: 50 Years of Maryland Public Television."

Slade will deliver McDaniel College's annual Lumen Lecture on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2026, at 7 p.m. in the Coley Rice Lounge. The talk is free and open to the public and centers on this year's theme, "Embed," which examines how deep engagement with local people and places shapes understanding and belonging.

The theme is a fitting match. The Lumen Scholars Program is McDaniel's honors program, instituted in 1986 and renamed in 2025 for the college motto, "I call you out of darkness into light." "Embed" is also the name of the program's first-year course, in which students learn to notice, explore, and reflect on the campus and the wider Westminster community, much as Slade has done with his paper. The program is directed by Chloe Irla, assistant dean of faculty development.

Slade said by email that he was "genuinely honored to be chosen," and that he hopes to use the talk to encourage students and neighbors "to reinvest themselves in this essential medium," whether by reading local papers, supporting them financially, or starting their own. "We all need to find ways to foster more informed, reflective, local voices in the larger conversation," he said.

The Mason-Dixon Surveyor is free at some 30 locations across northern Carroll County, Maryland, and southern York County, Pennsylvania, and back issues are posted online at masondixonsurveyor.wordpress.com. Slade's full conversation with Karen Shaak, which runs just over an hour and a half, is available on the At My Kitchen Table podcast.