How Gaston County gets news

Gaston County is a unique place. It's a mixture of "Northern Transplants," or northerners who have migrated south, and good ol' southern boys whose families have lived on the same street for five generations. We're ethnically and economically diverse and boast a suburban scene of shopping centers and cookie-cutter neighborhoods, but also farms and historical downtowns.

How Gaston County gets its news is just about as diverse as its people. I've found that my family's news sources are a pretty good representation of the rest of the county.

My father is from Ireland, and he has a slew of Irish newspapers shipped to him by his mother. They arrive weekly, wrapped in brown paper and leaving black newsprint on anyone who touches them. He also uses CNN.com for national and world news, but is not interested in local news. As he is not a U.S. citizen, he cannot vote and thus pays little attention to political news. He watches soccer religiously and knows each player and team better than his own children.

Like many people in Gaston County, my mother was laid off from her job in textiles. In order to save money, canceled her newspaper subscription. But previous to that, she read the Charlotte Observer rather than the Gaston Gazette. Now she turns to cable news channels like WSOC and FOX Charlotte, but after a 15 hour day at the printing business she and my stepdad own, she usually falls asleep midway through the broadcast.

On weekends, my mom reads Gaston Alive! Magazine, a small publication that covers food, entertainment and local events in Gaston County. I interned there this summer and although the circulation is 18,000, there is no "hard news" in the magazine, rather stories on local businesses and the arts.

My stepdad is a bit of a technology junkie. He follows @cnnbrk (CNN breaking news) on Twitter, uses Facebook and LinkedIn and watches the nightly newscasts. While networking for their business, he chats with other professionals in Charlotte and gets news from their conversations.

My stepmother gets her news from what other people tell her. She never reads newspapers or watches TV news. She uses the internet only for Facebook, which she seldom checks. Around the dinner table, my father and I will bring up news and she rarely knows what we're talking about. She never registered to vote and thus pays not attention to politics. But she's an expert on celebrity gossip, reading People, InTouch and watching E! News.

My stepsister is similar. She does not follow any professional publications, but turns to her friends for news. Although she often thinks she knows what is going on, the details are usually incorrect or missing completely.

My younger sister gets her news from her high school. Teachers bring up news topics and she is required to write summaries on "current events." Her blackberry is attached to her thumbs, and so she is always in the loop with the latest high school gossip. She watches more sports than the rest of our family and sometimes understands them.

I consider myself a bit of a news junkie. I read The Daily Tar Heel, skim The New York Times, follow a diverse population on Twitter, stalk people religiously on Facebook, read The Gaston Gazette on Saturdays, read the headlines on my RSS feeds and watch ABC news after Grey's Anatomy. I have a weakness for magazines, especially trashy tabloids, and I never miss a major awards show.

So you see, it's impossible to make a generalization about news sources in Gaston County as they vary as much as the residents. For the most part, we're sufficiently informed, but on what we are informed ranges from international news and sports to the gossip in the halls of South Point High School.