One-of-a-Kind, Homegrown Alabama Newspaper to be Featured on APT, Documented by UA Center

GUNTERSVILLE, ALA — There are no colorful graphics, no large, provocative headlines, and only a few photographs. Many of the stories are written on a manual typewriter and the editor admits the paper seems old-fashioned, a bit like the once-stodgy Wall Street Journal.

A new documentary on Alabama Public Television asks why, then, is the Advertiser-Gleam in Guntersville, Ala., the state’s largest non-daily newspaper?

The documentary, titled “The Advertiser-Gleam,” airs at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 16. The documentary is a production of The University of Alabama Center for Public Television and Radio.

It’s probably not the big stories that attract most readers. It’s the small ones. Such as the article about the family that keeps finding snake skins six feet long in the attic, or the old country store where the bachelor proprietor left $110,000 dollars in the safe when he died. There’s the account of the emu caught strolling in one of the nicest neighborhoods in town, and the story of the confused killdeer that tried to hatch a pecan instead of an egg.

“All newspapers have features as well as what you call hard news,” says editor Sam Harvey. “But we try a little harder to find news that will be of interest to people, even though it may not be of great significance.”

The Advertiser-Gleam is fiercely devoted to all the news that’s fit to print in Marshall County. Porter Harvey, Sam’s father, left the Birmingham Post-Herald to establish the paper in 1941. He would publish news about almost anything that happened in Marshall County but hardly anything that happened elsewhere.

“Stories that most people thought were trivial, he could see angles in them that would be intriguing to people,” remembers Sam Harvey who, after reporting for the Columbus Dispatch and the Louisville Times, returned to Guntersville to work with his father. “He wrote a story about a column of ants and where it was going as it crossed the parking lot at the bank across the street and followed it where it went, but he made that into a darn interesting story. Most newspapers would have kind of snickered at that.”

Aside from its retro look, commitment to local news, and fascination with unusual stories, the Advertiser-Gleam may be best known for its obituaries. Porter Harvey felt that everyone had a story to tell, not just famous people. So he established the practice of contacting the next-of-kin in order to create an authentic portrait of everyone in the community who had died.

An obituary featured in the documentary notes that the deceased “was the last man to deliver mail on a bike in Parches Cove,” and was nicknamed “Jelly” for his ability to elude tacklers as a high school football player.

Among the facts included in Porter Harvey’s obituary in 1995 was the bungee jump he made to celebrate his 90th birthday.

“It’s amazing how often you can find people who may not have been educated or learned but who were successful and did interesting things during their lives,” says Sam Harvey, who continues publishing the personalized obituaries his father pioneered. He says usually relatives appreciate the opportunity to tell about the dearly departed’s history, experiences, loves, hobbies, and ailments.

Marshall County has plenty of big stories, too, and the Advertiser-Gleam publishes the details of murders, meth labs, and the highs and lows of civic government.

But it wouldn’t be the Advertiser-Gleam without the small stories.

“I think the important thing is not how the paper looks, but what’s in it,” says Harvey. “And I think our readers have learned that if they read this paper they are going to find things that are interesting to read.”