By Andrea Vasquez

I had never been to the South, nor had I given the region much thought outside history class, Hurricane Katrina and Lynyrd Skynyrd songs. I first heard of Vicksburg , Miss., about a month before I moved to the port city, population 26,000, at the bottom of the Mississippi Delta.

Despite its being the county seat, Vicksburg was about one third of the size of the smallest city I’d ever lived in.

As soon as Vicksburgers started recognizing me from a short bio and mug shot that ran on Page A-2 after I began my internship, I found out what it means to live in a city as big as my university community: People know what’s happening, to whom it’s happening and where that person’s parents attend church.

My managing editor at The Vicksburg Post told me people have two things in this world – their name and their word. “So don’t misquote them and don’t misspell their names,” she said. It wasn’t empty advice.

On my first day I became one fifth of the news and features reporting staff. Then two new full-time reporters signed on in the next few weeks. The size of the staff had nearly doubled since my arrival.

My first full story ran on the front page, one of several stories that would receive such play during my internship. I felt skittish while writing my first news briefs and stories, just as I had at my college paper.

Those initial weeks at the Post were spent learning the lay of the land, the style of the paper and the dynamics of the newsroom.

The Post’s executive editor called me into his office my first day on the job. He warned that I would feel useless during this period of acclimatization – and, for the most part, I did – but he said he hoped I would become such an integral part of the newsroom that by the time I left in 10 weeks, “we won’t know what we did without you.” I did feel like a piece in the Post’s puzzle after only a few weeks – though I doubt that my departure was as traumatic as he feared it would be.

During my week at Chips Quinn orientation in Nashville, Tenn., some of my fellow Chipsters had the words “Associated Press,” “The Washington Post” and “The Denver Post” at the bottom of their name tags. It was easy to be intimidated. I was one of the youngest in our group, going to my first internship at a paper I had never heard of just two months earlier.

But as I learned, small community newspapers are not where old or failed reporters go to die. Among the thousands of daily newspapers around the country, many serve cities with fewer than 50,000 residents, and many of these papers – especially family-owned newspapers like The Vicksburg Post – are faring better than some big-name papers amid the double-whammy of the print-to-Web transition and the economic recession. Although fewer people may have seen my byline in Vicksburg than if I’d been in Washington, more people were remembering it.

I’m still new at journalism – I don’t know what it’s like to work for a big metro newspaper or even what I might experience at a Vicksburg-size or smaller paper in another town elsewhere in the country. Content and style vary to fit each audience as much as the reporters who help create it, whether at USA Today or the Bonner County Daily Bee in Sandpoint, Idaho.

This summer, there was no better place for me than Vicksburg.

Andrea Vasquez is a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She was a Summer 2009 Chips Quinn Scholar for The Vicksburg (Miss.) Post. Vasquez has worked for two years at the Daily Nebraskan, the student newspaper, as a staff reporter, agriculture beat reporter, senior features reporter and senior news reporter. She is on the dean’s list for the College of Journalism and Mass Communications and is a National Hispanic Scholar and member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars.