If one were standing on South Lawler Street in Mitchell, S.D., in front of the building that's home to The Daily Republic, one might be inclined to extend one's sympathies to Noel Hamiel, the paper's longtime publisher, what with the rise of the internet and the dramatic slides in circulation at papers across America.

Things would have to be even worse here in the heart of America's bread basket. This remote part of South Dakota has been losing population for years as families give up their small farms and move away.

But in fact the Republic is quite healthy. Though tiny, with a circulation of just 12,443, it's actually seen circulation gains. Advertising is strong, too.

But what's especially interesting about The Republic is just how typical it is of so many smaller papers across the U.S., which is to say typical of American newspapers generally. For all the talk of the big papers' struggles, the vast majority of daily newspapers in America are small, the size of The Republic or maybe a bit bigger but not all that much. Many of them are also doing well.

By one industry estimate, 75 to 80 percent of the American newspaper industry is made up of smaller papers that are maintaining circulation or even reporting small gains.

When people talk about the circulation crisis sweeping across the newspaper industry, they're talking about the big city dailies and those in mid-size markets. And much of that talk is coming out of Wall Street, where the focus is on profitability.

Wall Street doesn't spend much time talking about The Daily Republic of Mitchell, S.D., which is probably just as well. For The Republic's Hamiel, the focus is on viability, putting out a good paper, one that people will read.

"People who say they don't have time to read the paper really mean they aren't going to take the time to read boring stories," say Hamiel. "Newspapers have to invest in content.”

The Republic has, and it's paid off. Circulation has risen between 0.5 percent and 1.5 percent annually in recent years, and it now claims a pretty high penetration over the 17 sparse counties it serves, with some 32,000 readers.

Similar gains are being reported by small papers elsewhere around the country, according to the most recent numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. In some cases, they're in markets undergoing population booms, as in Port Charlotte, Fla., and Flagstaff, Ariz., for example.

But not always. Morgantown, W.Va., is experiencing no such boom, and yet its Dominion-Post, circulation 21,000, can claim to be the fastest-growing newspaper in the state.

"That's pretty impressive these days, especially for the smaller markets because the markets themselves aren't growing and yet the newspapers are still posting circulation gains," says Randy Craig of the Inland Press Association.

Craig thinks he understands why. "It's all about local. In any given situation, if you want to know what is happening, you have to read the local newspaper. No matter what community, the newspaper is going to be the premier information gatherer. It is going to have the kind of news that people want and they can't get from TV, the radio or the internet."

And that's even so when the small community paper is in a larger market covered by a much bigger daily, even where it puts out a zoned edition skimming off the top local stories.

"That's just not going to compete with a broadsheet paper covering that community," says Craig. The first read will still be the smaller paper, where everything that moves gets a mention.

As much as anything, that reflects a fundamental difference in news philosophy between big and small papers. For years, so many big dailies were competing for national ranking, and for Pulitzer Prizes, opening bureaus in Washington and New York and sometimes overseas. They shunned local news, dismissing much of it as chicken dinner news, the squibbles that came out of, say, a speech at a Rotary lunch.

Not so the small papers. Their philosophy never changed. Rooted in the community, and far more dependent on advertising from community businesses, they kept covering the Rotary lunches and the school board meetings and the zoning board.

It turned out to be a smart move. Says Craig of the larger papers: "About 13 years ago chicken dinner news didn't get any respect. It's getting more respect now that it is being touted as a key to newspapers' survival."

Bob Scaife, the Newspaper Association of America's vice president of small-market newspapers, agrees that local content is what sets the small papers apart.

"That's the key to their growing success versus the declines in major metros," Scaife says. "Community newspapers and smaller papers provide their market areas with more local content. That local little paper, because it has been doing it for so long, really has a stranglehold on the market."

And if that's news to big city editors, it's not to people who read newspapers. They've been saying so for the longest time. A study by the Readership Institute in 2000 found that respondents were most interested in things happening in their towns and neighborhoods, what's called hyper-local news. They want to know about the traffic accident they saw down the street and they want the scores from Johnny's soccer game.

But just grinding out the local news is not enough. In the new competitive environment, the emphasis must be on better reporting and writing, or what journalists call writing to your reader.

Says The Republic's Hamiel: "Newspapers have to be better written than ever before. It's not enough to throw local news out there. You have to have quality as well as quantity."