Tiny Deerfield, N.H., isn't anywhere near the Atlantic Ocean. Yet for the longest time residents thought they must be residing in the Bermuda Triangle. Or at least it seemed so on the days they picked up the various dailies that were dropped off in town.

There was little or no news about Deerfield, or for that matter nearby Candia, Northwood and Nottingham. The towns seemed to have disappeared.

“We’re in a town of 4,000 people, and there is no coverage unless someone is murdered or there is a big fair,” says Maureen Mann. “You can’t find out who is running for office. It’s almost impossible.”

So Mann and her neighbors did the unthinkable. They started their own newspaper, the Forum. “We were motivated by how the hell do you find out what’s going on in this town?”

The Forum is a reverse-published newspaper that gets most of its copy from its web site, which is updated weekly with 30 to 40 stories. The actual paper is published on an as-needed basis, coming out three or four times a year. It is mailed to about 7,200 homes. The most recent issue was an election preview.

Yet the Forum is every bit a newspaper and a unique one at that. It covers its four tiny rural communities using no professional journalists, relying entirely on residents. Many staffers are retirees, including the managing editor, a former high school teacher. It has nearly 80 regular contributors, some as old as 90, filing reports of the goings-on in their towns and neighborhoods.

No one receives a salary, the one exception being an ad sales person who works on commission.

The Forum was founded in August 2005 as the Philbrick James Forum and filed for nonprofit status. To get going, it got a grant of $17,000 from the J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism in College Park, Md.

“We started out with some people who were very political and some unpolitical people,” recalls Mann, but she says the aim is very non-political.

In one regard, the Forum is very unlike a traditional newspaper, reflecting its unique mandate. Its news is a two-way proposition. Says Mann: “Our theory is, we don’t want to tell you what’s going on, we want you to tell us what’s going on.”

It would be heart-warming to many to believe that the Forum is the first inkling of a new trend sweeping the American newspaper industry, the beginning of a citizen uprising after years of being fed up with spotty to simply bad coverage of their communities.

It probably isn't. Newspapers are expensive propositions, not something mere citizens routinely undertake. “This is a huge undertaking at a grassroots level,” observes Diane Hockenberry, director of audience development for the Newspaper Association of America.

“There has to be something that they are particularly passionate about because there is a lot to starting a newspaper. It’s not like The Examiner (in Washington, D.C.) that was started by a billionaire.”

And yet the Forum in some ways does capture a trend. More and more papers are listening to readers as never before, and many are encouraging readers to contribute to their coverage. In part that's a matter of economics, as staff cuts trim reporters' ranks, and often in marginal communities. Says Hockenberry: “A lot of newspapers are enhancing their coverage using contributed content to make sure they are covering segments of their market where needs aren’t being met."

Interestingly, though, the rise of the Forum has stirred more coverage by the very papers that once ignored Deerfield and its sister towns. Last September the Manchester Union-Leader started a weekly section devoted to those communities. Says Mann: “Concord is covering us more, and the seacoast papers are covering us more. So we are oddly enough getting more coverage than ever.”

But in the meantime, the Forum has established its base, and Jan Schaffer says proved its value. Schaffer is executive director for J-Lab, whose funding got the Forum running.

"I think it is so successful because of the determination of the original volunteers and because the community had no news media whatsoever, so this really filled a vacuum."