I was kvetching here the other day about the fact that Yakima has no public radio station. That is, the FM station most likely to be used for local public radio programming is owned and operated by Washington State University as Northwest Public Radio, a statewide radio network based at the university in Pullman, which distributes national programming and some fitful regional news reports via satellite to all its stations simultaneously. I have a love-hate relationship with NWPR, and all over-the-air broadcasters, for that matter.

Because I’m interested in focusing more on my town in this blog, I was interested in this story on nytimes.com, about the localist foodie scene in Portland, that provincial wide place on the Columbia just southwest of here. Some of these folks have developed quite a bit of local fervor over nearby food production and consumption, resulting in at least one incident of fisticuffs.

Localism, if you define it in extreme terms, has always been around. All you have to do is move in from someplace else to discover the social power structure of a town. In my experience, this structure never really absorbs newcomers. Or maybe I’m just not willing to be absorbed. Generally, the newcomers just develop their own networks.

I think there is a new localism afoot. Some is being generated, perversely, by carpetbagging newcomers, like Ed Marquand and his Mighty Tieton development in the tiny town of Tieton, just west of here. It’s a bunch of arts-business people who’ve moved in from Seattle and are revitalizing a dead-town-walking fruit warehouse community. It’s a cross between economic development and gentrification that has already shaken things up out there. Yakima would be smart to emulate this activity — we already have a strong, if ego-Balkanized, arts community.

Another example. July 31, the Yakima Music Festival puts on a day of street concerts by local rock bands and others on North Front Street, one of our oldest blocks — just north of Yakima Avenue — which has an active merchant group of restauranteurs and others doing promotions. Kendall Weaver, a Yakiima radio guy, is apparently producing the entertainment for the event.

Yakima has a lively newspaper, the Herald-Republic. Newspapers in small towns have no trouble being hyper-local. What’s-going-on-here is their product, unlike broadcast stations, which are mostly clueless about how to cover their communities, and are either owned by top-down corporate networks or focused on their own variety of industrial provincialism — standardizing, importing employees, rather than bucking their norms and developing stations that look and sound like their towns. They’re only passionate about appearing to be local.

KIMA-TV, for example, has recently made a big promotional deal out of being the last TV station in town with a completely-locally-based news staff, though their on-air news content isn’t any more comprehensively local than it used to be, or demonstrably better than their competitors, and continues to be produced under nationally-consulted tabloid-style TV news norms. (I’ll take this on in detail in a future post.) Because of broadcasters and, now, Internet media, most of us have more-or-less lost the ability to make local thinking a conscious priority.

Yakima, like most communities, has a look and feel, a character. You have to live in it to get it. Get out of the house, away from the screens and speakers, and you’re in it.