THIS IS PERFECT. in his past life he worked as a marketing manager for a travel company so he's constantly building a town profile in his head about how he could market this place to tourists and your guy's magazine would be the perfect yes this is real i can not make this small-town shit up addition to it. chris is the type of person to make it A THING to pop some popcorn and sit down to read all the gossip, like, it'll honestly make his whole week/month/year.
he'll have to get some sort of contact fast-track to your guy to share anything juicy/weird he finds out and he's fine being painted as the new local crazy.