It's no secret that small-town newspaper editors have to deal with pressure from local bigwigs. But last fall the tradition was taken one step further in tiny Postville, Iowa: community leaders put their proudly independent town weekly out of business.

A weary Patrick Huber, editor and publisher of the ninety-eight-year-old Postville Herald, cleared out his storefront office days before Thanksgiving and left town in December. Selling the paper at a $ 60,000 loss to the rival Postville Leader, Huber conceded victory to the Postville Community Improvement Committee, which only nine months earlier had invited the Leader to open up shop. It was the climax of a long battle between Huber and several community leaders who felt Huber's "negative" reporting hurt the town's image.

"Postville, like many small communities, is decaying," says Huber, who, at fifty-one, is planning a new career in computer programming. "I'm sure that was part of the problem. People saw that things were not like they were ten or fifteen years ago, and they tried to find someone to blame. I was the messenger who was blamed because I was doing my job."

What Huber's job was supposed to be depends on who you talk to in this farm town of 1,473 in the hills of northeastern Iowa. Arriving in Postville in 1985 with a master's degree in journalism and a smattering of daily newspaper experience, Huber says he knew he was hardly typical of what Postville had come to expect from its editors.

"I thought, maybe it'll work," Huber says. "Maybe the small-town paper does not have to be about who ate dinner with whom, who died last week, and who wont he local ball game. I thought Postville could be trained to appreciate the value of quality journalism."

Back issues of his fallen paper show that Huber aimed high. Although his stories consistently took a folksy tone and often included opinion and anlaysis, Huber mostly used an aggressive approach to covering his four-county beat. Typical items included:

* An interview with the administrator of Postville's Community Memorial Hospital, in Huber's very first issue, in which the administrator warned that the hospital might be forced to close. A number of readers were upset that Huber had treated this as news, he says. But the hospital eventually did close.

* a front-page, six-part series on drug use in rural Iowa. In a later column, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, now a presidential candidate, praised the series and said he had read the articles into a congressional subcommittee record.

* Huber's revelations that the state-funded Big Four Fair board had scheduled its annual fair while ignoring smaller groups -- specifically the wives of local volunteer firefighters, who had set aside the same weekend for their Firette's Annual Fun Days.

* an Associated Press report citing Postville State Bank for having one of Iowa's lowest ratios of loans to assets. Huber says PSB bank officials never advertised in the paper again.

Such coverage did not endear Huber to the local establishment. In the summer of 1990, a group of some fifteen bankers and businessman formed the Postville Community Improvement Committee to bolster the town's flagging fortunes. Working in conjunction with a consultant from the University of Northern Iowa, they held a town meeting and established Postville's top three development priorities: stronger education, more housing -- and a "better newspaper."

After shopping around for a publisher that fall, the committee found Dan Witte, president of News Publishing Inc., a chain of weeklies based in Black Earth, Wisconsin. Witte set up an office directly across the street from the Herald and hired Barb Seichter, a public relations specialist, as editor. The lead story in Seichter's first issue, published on February 13, 1991, was an update on the activities of the Postville Community Improvement Committee. Her first editorial said, in part, "We aren't interested in uncovering or creating scandals."

In December 1991, Charles Wittman replaced Seichter as editor. Huber, he says, never completely understood the role of a small-town newspaper. "There are subtleties you have to be aware of, Wittman says, "but I don't consider them restrictions. I think there is an element of boosterism." Wittman himself was replaced by Kevin Land in January.

A handful of Postville residents interviewed about the two newspapers agreed that "the big shots" basically decided to shut the Herald down. However, they also said they were never particularly devoted to Huber's newspaper and always considered him an outsider. Residents give Postville State Ban president Ronald Taylor and Citizens State Bank president James Lage much of the credit for killing the Herald. Neither Taylor nor Lage would comment, and the improvement committee's official spokesman, a local veterinarian, said he would not comment unless he could review CJR's article before publication.

Tom Johnson, general manager of what is now the Herald-Leader, says his paper is not "a puppet" of the business community, as Huber charges. Rather, he says, the paper is willing to work with the community instead of against it. "We're real service-oriented and are conscious of the people's wishes," he says.

Huber never stopped trying to "educate" his readers. Even when he had to report on the efforts to kill his own paper, Huber's copy remained remarkably neutral. However, he could not resist printing a 1988 public television transcript detailing how Dan Witte, at News Publishing, had fired one of his editors for displeasing an advertiser. He also included a quote from a 1989 collumn by Geneva Overholser of The Des Moines Register: "The best thing I can give Iowans is rarer than good news. It's a good newspaper."

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