Amidst the daily gloom&doom dispatches about the crisis facing large metro newspapers, it’s easy to miss that down on the smalltown level, newspapers are doing better than ever before.

An NPR report that you can listen to here, talks to the publisher and citizens in Pelham, AL, a small town of 22,000 outside Birmingham that is getting its first paper – a free weekly – and they couldn’t be more eager to read it.

And, as one woman says, “Go through it to clip out some coupons.”