WELCOME TO “THE FINE PRINT”, the musings of Michael Schrader!

The genesis of “The Fine Print” was a series of “letters-to-the-editor” I wrote to the Farmington Press-Leader when I was a candidate for District 1 County Commissioner of St. Francois County, Missouri, in 1994. While I did not win the election, I did end up with my very own newspaper column – “The Fine Print”. “The Fine Print” ran in the Press-Leader until after I had moved to Arkansas. The column was basically dormant until July 1996, when I begin writing it again regularly for a new newspaper in the small town of Beebe, Arkansas, called the Neighborhood Journal. “The Fine Print” was a regular feature of the Journal until its demise at the end of 1999.

The column again lay dormant for the next eighteen months until I acquired a web address and taught myself how to make web pages in July 2001. Since that time, new columns, as well as archives, have been posted regularly.

I try to post a new article on the average of once a week. Depending on the topic and the size of the article, it can take me anywhere from three to fourteen hours to compose and post an article, so, unlike writing for a newspaper, I am not slavishly committed to a weekly schedule – sometimes I may post more than one a week, sometimes it may be several weeks between postings.

Because I have written upwards of two-hundred columns, I have broken the indexing of columns down into subindexes reflecting key periods in time. Because I have lived in four states since I started writing, I have decided to index the columns by geography, which so happens to follow a logical chronology as well. The four subindexes are as follows:

INDEX 1: Missouri. This covers the period up to January 1995, and contains the columns published in the Farmington Press-Leader.

INDEX 2: Arkansas. This covers the period from January 1995 through December 1999, and includes all columns published in the Neighborhood Journal. Although I moved from Arkansas to Texas in March 1999, I was still writing columns for the Journal until it folded in December of that year.