What Is Your Quest? To Find the Lake Ozark Business Journal.

I like newsprint. Magazines are good, too, but they possess neither the ease nor the elegance offered by newspapers. I could spend hours with a single issue, particularly if there happens to be a hot pot of coffee nearby, a comfortable patio chair overlooking the water, and the sounds of birds chirping in the morning. A bit idyllic, but perhaps one of my favorite ways to spend a morning.

I suppose this fondness began as a young child, for I have great memories of reading the newspaper with my Dad and — when ALL the family was together — of the adults sitting around my Grandparents’ table, reading the paper, passing the sections back and forth, drinking coffee and/or Bloody Mary’s, and finishing the Sunday crossword puzzle. It’s the sight we kids would wake to (along with the aroma of homemade cinnamon rolls) and join, waiting our turn for the comics and the Sports page.

I’ve thus become a bit of a newspaper connoisseur. Like wines, the quality varies from publication to publication and is dependent on the vintage. Hand me a Wall Street Journal any day of the week (save for Sundays … there is no Sunday issue) and I’m a happy man. The Omaha World Herald (the publication I grew up with) is also a good read with real articles and solid local content. Unfortunately, my current paper, The News & Observer, is a waste of the paper its printed on. Add in the fact that we get the Durham edition and I don’t even subscribe. Its a travesty that a metro area as large as Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill doesn’t have a decent paper. Fortunately, the weekly Triangle Business Journal picks up the slack, at least as far as local economic news is concerned.

A similar train of thought sent me on a quest to locate the Lake of the Ozarks Business Journal, and the quest was a brief one. Published by Benne Publishing, Inc., LOBJ is a monthly that can be viewed online. Despite there being a few articles of interest, I must admit to being underwhelmed. A lot of that has to do with the mix of articles in the March issue (admittedly not the greatest month for events newsworthiness in the Ozarks) and a content-to-total ratio (total number of pages less the advertisement whole-page-equivalents, all divided by the total number of pages) of 23%. Though not a very good first impression, I do intend to return and read again.

With any luck, it’ll be the hard copy as I look out over the main channel MM19.