The Power of Local

Lexington City elders took a big, pricey trip to Austin earlier this year for "inspiration" and no doubt picked up a big, beautiful Austin Chronicle while they were there. The Chronicle is a longtime role model for Ace (along with the Nashville Scene) -- Austin would not be the same city without it.

Just as one example, there would be no "South by Southwest" - and who wants to live in a world where there's no SXSW?

The power of buying locally is something that alt-newsweeklies have been hammering since they first took off about 40 years ago. (Ace, founded in 1989, is a relative youngster as we prepare to turn 20 in '09.) This is a gospel Ace has been preaching for two decades — we still have the tote bags!

It's one of the principles Ace was founded on; and we're delighted to see a Buy Local/Locavore movement gathering increasing steam. (When we first added "Best restaurant for locavores" as a category in the Best of Lex Readers' Poll, not everybody knew what it was. Then the word went straight from trendy to passe when Brooke Shields cooked "a locavore Thanksgiving" on a "very special episode of Lipstick Jungle." Who cares? Even latecomers are welcome to this bandwagon, and it's no surprise to us that our smart friends over at the Austin Chronicle have done a little of the math on the subject.

Ace intern Michael Porter came across this on their website: "'if every Chronicle reader this month shifts $100 in holiday spending to a local, independently-owned store, it will equal more than $40 million to help the Austin economy."

I wonder what that statistic would look like for Lexington.

Their website is austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/AdIndex/GiftPages.