I like to photograph small town newspapers whenever I encounter them—especially in Montana and western North Dakota. I wish I could post photos here! I have dozens of them. And many of the little weeklies are still thriving and remain an important source of local news. I'm also deeply grateful to the do-it-all reporters who interviewed me about my book at 1) the Crosby Journal in North Dakota, and 2) The Nugget in Sisters, Ore. I probably sold 200 books thanks to those insightful interviews with local papers!
Yes! The people who are still doing it are amazing. I didn't mention it in this piece but I spent a summer in college filling in for the editor of a small-town weekly and the whole job was all about community building.
Kathleen- These are great questions with even better explorations. I appreciate this thoughtful piece. And your insight on real estate and class is very accurate. Hope you’re well this week? Cheers, -Thalia
I live just south of Hardwick, VT, where the local newspaper building has become a community org, The Civic Standard, which is doing necessary and awesome and also fun things in their rural town. Community dinners, a haiku club, helping neighbors after the flooding last summer, a HUGE yankee swap, just a ton of great, heartwarming activity. https://www.facebook.com/thecivicstandard/
I love this! So many of the old buildings have been redeveloped in ways just to make money, but this sounds like a true community hub, very cool to hear.
Here in Spokane, the Spokesman-Review is still in its original home in the Cowles Building (though presumably occupies less of it now). The print operation was across the street, but has moved out to the valley where real estate is much cheaper. The former print building now houses a local distillery and its tasting room/restaurant, which I think is really cool.
The Livingston Enterprise has just relocated to what used to be the pawn shop at the end of my alley. They were sold a year ago, the print facility seems to be dormant, and the old building (a very boring 70s building) is for sale. The paper has gone from 5 days afternoon delivery to 2 day delivery, with a lot of blather about their "expanded web content". Local reporting seems to be mostly press releases run verbatim (a few exceptions. Karin Ronnow is doing some really good reporting.) I just subscribed to the Bozeman Chronicle for the winter (wood stove! I need newsprint!) and had to call some call center in India to sign up. It comes by mail, but we'll see. I'm of the age where not getting a daily paper is weird and unsettling -- but no one will deliver one to me ...
I lived outside the US for so long, I got used to not reading print years ago. But I know what's left can be scammy in terms of pricing - the companies know people cling to their physical papers, so they charge outrageous subscription fees for a product that's about 1/50th what it used to be.
Yes, 1/50th of generalist smush without editorial categorization. If that function was actually done beyond 5 sections, it would dawn on editors they could expand each of those niches for hardcopy and feedback online from readers and tipsters interested enough to be drawn to that specialty info. Then greatest hits in that niche can make it to generalist pages or screens because of some universal human interest. Until then, detailed reporting is non-existent and generalist jive is of poor quality in content and it’s biased sources. So many internet providers in rural and desert Americs have bought out local newspapers to bolster their tv fare, unfortunately almost all just print government press releases and charge s few businesses for ads. No solutions for local problems by anything other than petty policy and a few charities.
No questioning of neglect by officialdumb no thoughts on gaining customers from tourists to new industries, just a non-functional status quo that is locally protected by their relatives or paid “public servants” who cover for neglect.
Without criticism, some small towns have no indexes of employees or contact info, no organization charts, no published budgets, and no links that ever work.
However, we intend to showcase best practices in competitive privatizing of services to ideation in new Intentional Communities. Data center folks against censorship are ignoring socialist bribes for rural internet and building their own. They seem supportive of samizdat’s in America. We’re organizing this at FreedomTVnetworks.com but aren’t forgetting the role of hardcopy niche newsprint to be good enough to be keepers.
In 1970, CH Hoiles, ageing publisher of 57 libertarian newspapers & 6 TV stations, allied with me as a 17-year old editor of an 8-page youth newspaper The New Horizon. I had challenged him to do niche marketing across his chain to create 517 newsprint magazines to support local to national newswrappers they would go in. I asked him to think about how many boat articles there are in the general smush sports pages among 3 major sports from high school to pro, when there are 17 boat magazines in any boat sales place. Further, we would ask existing subscribers and their family members exactly what types of newsprint magazines and frequency they would want as hardcopy keepers for ten-cents each. Higher interest would reduce the bulk being ignored as bird cage liners, and kept with a passion shared with other like-minded folks. Then we would collate them in a custom assembled bag, delivered to their doorstep.
Hardcopy still has a place.
Through 2 management and generational changes (the former one was trying to devalue the chain by refusing to do the newsprint magazine plan, and lost to generational owners, but it still was not implemented).
I advocated CH Hoiles and my plan for editorial and classified computerization, satellite or telex networked copy. He knew local news would die without other niche markets supporting it, with all the local possibilities for demonstrating freedom in common area management & maintenance (CAMM) using Volitional Science & Business he wrote editorials about. CH sent his reporters through Voli Sci courses by Jay Snelson; versus fascist business-government partnerships and socialist politicization of Social Science and Public /Police /Surveillance Administration.
Simple marketing was going to have a chance until in borrowing 40% of $1B from Blackstone & Providence Equity to sell the papers to the 3rd/4th generations, the Chinese Communists who supplied about 25 years ago 20% of Blackstone’s capital, ordered the CEO without board seats but quietly to pull their loans. Freedom Newspapers Inc. was surprised even as the most pragmatic of anti-communist anti-stateist papers in America. I did investigative reporting on why this was being pushed and went to the board, but they deemed it too late. Freedom Newspapers was sold off to cross town rivals for basically the price of paper rolls.
I continued to push for it to major buyers who didn’t quite know what to do, even as smorgasbord subscriber selected magazine services rise, even as I developed 2-way PhoneVoter TV Network in 1992, see PhoneVoter.us and todays FreedomTVnetworks.com/producers and interactive iTV networks ramping up in 2024: WomenLeading.infoRViTV.com and DebateTourney.com
and ad agencies largely owned or managed by women get it. If you do, as I think so, say hello. There is still a place for hardcopy.
Really interesting, thank you for this. I know there were people in the trenches who saw what was coming, but the larger powers didn't listen and policymakers, etc, seem to see the loss of information to their benefit rather than a harm to all of us.
Thank You for replying. My original 1970 proposal showed a boy with a blocky mobile phone, a satellite receiver dish out his bedroom window, a newspaper sports section headline about the Indy 500, and the boys question being electro-typed to a reporter with a number and s story with s number: “What is a pole position?”
Hoiles had showed me his classified area with phosphor green screens compared to the manual and a few electric typewriters in the editorial rooms. It handled 375,000 local subscribers. He asked me what I saw as the difference between the two, and asked me for a proposal publisher to publisher.
I didn’t want his money and diverted a standing $1000 bounty for proving him wrong in his editorials to the local Young Americans for Freedom Orange County chapter I led, because they were doing things for liberty. I did allow him to send me through the V-50 course, by Jay Snelson, now on libertarianism.org or Liberty.me
That showed me how to creatively solve problems without force of law or military/police force. I became the nation’s expert on Percentage As You Earn %PAYEment finance & finansurance of Humane Investments (HI). See PAYEhome.org/tool-kit
%AYE Mutual Medical Finansurance for all in the free-market and Health Portal TV ramping up on HealthPortalHome.com
There are better ways to achieve more equality efforts and a middle class than governmentality. Grin.
Today, I am creating a Rockies to Wasatch Mountains Board of Trade, Tourism & Television. It will have a News Pool Bureau among all the neglected areas and small town newspapers among the radio & TV repeaters of general smush news. See R2W3T.org next week.
I am one of the leading advocates of all multi-subjective opinions welcome in 2-way reality TV. We are developing Mass Audience Response Systems (MARS) where each individual matters as a minority of one. MARS will empower (not tv/platform executives but) viewer-participants & parents to: filter, rate, label, warn, PhoneVote on a topic, a 2nd PhoneVote if some fool proposes force of law. 31 other types interactivity will engage and create 8 income streams where 1-way TV and newspapers only have 2 or 3 including subscriptions.
See other efforts in Environmental Prototype Intentional Communities (EPIC)s, that rely on media such as PahvantWALDC.com
I also at 17 learned from Robert LeFevre of the Freedom School and Freedom Newspapers. He wrote an anarcho-capitalist book Urbana that described “America’s Mist Wanted” on how without police, readers or viewers could assist security firms in tracking down criminals who committed only crimes against individuals, not any state.
I worked out with him a reprise of Ben Franklin’s percentage-of-income mutual firefighting Finansurance companies. See PAYEhome.org/experts
And I met the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL) that same year 1971. I became a co-founder of Liberty Internationale now in 90 nations & undergrounds. See Liberty-Intl.org
If you’d like to use your wisdom to advance best practices in networked showcased local news and Volitional solutions nationwide and globally, say hello. People can vote with their wallets every day instead of every 4 years for one size fits all politician-theives, I play well with socialists and class minded and inequity inequality concerned folks, yet usually have them beat with practical praxeology with better outcomes in freedom. Grin, Brock.FreedomiTV@protonmail.com
My hometown paper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, has had a journey as well.
WRT your town: have you ever been in the courthouse? If not, go there now, it's an amazing structure. I had a case there several years ago, and the judge bragged that the courthouse had cost more to build than the state capitol building. Beautiful interior stone imported from Italy, hauled by wagon up the hill from the rail depot. There was still a wooden toilet in the building a decade ago -- I don't know about now. That's what he told me, anyway. It's an emphasis on the physical that we just don't see any more. Buildings like the Gallatin County justice center is about all we're up for these days.
I like to photograph small town newspapers whenever I encounter them—especially in Montana and western North Dakota. I wish I could post photos here! I have dozens of them. And many of the little weeklies are still thriving and remain an important source of local news. I'm also deeply grateful to the do-it-all reporters who interviewed me about my book at 1) the Crosby Journal in North Dakota, and 2) The Nugget in Sisters, Ore. I probably sold 200 books thanks to those insightful interviews with local papers!
Yes! The people who are still doing it are amazing. I didn't mention it in this piece but I spent a summer in college filling in for the editor of a small-town weekly and the whole job was all about community building.
Kathleen- These are great questions with even better explorations. I appreciate this thoughtful piece. And your insight on real estate and class is very accurate. Hope you’re well this week? Cheers, -Thalia
I live just south of Hardwick, VT, where the local newspaper building has become a community org, The Civic Standard, which is doing necessary and awesome and also fun things in their rural town. Community dinners, a haiku club, helping neighbors after the flooding last summer, a HUGE yankee swap, just a ton of great, heartwarming activity. https://www.facebook.com/thecivicstandard/
I love this! So many of the old buildings have been redeveloped in ways just to make money, but this sounds like a true community hub, very cool to hear.
Here in Spokane, the Spokesman-Review is still in its original home in the Cowles Building (though presumably occupies less of it now). The print operation was across the street, but has moved out to the valley where real estate is much cheaper. The former print building now houses a local distillery and its tasting room/restaurant, which I think is really cool.
Sounds like a good use of the space!
The Livingston Enterprise has just relocated to what used to be the pawn shop at the end of my alley. They were sold a year ago, the print facility seems to be dormant, and the old building (a very boring 70s building) is for sale. The paper has gone from 5 days afternoon delivery to 2 day delivery, with a lot of blather about their "expanded web content". Local reporting seems to be mostly press releases run verbatim (a few exceptions. Karin Ronnow is doing some really good reporting.) I just subscribed to the Bozeman Chronicle for the winter (wood stove! I need newsprint!) and had to call some call center in India to sign up. It comes by mail, but we'll see. I'm of the age where not getting a daily paper is weird and unsettling -- but no one will deliver one to me ...
I lived outside the US for so long, I got used to not reading print years ago. But I know what's left can be scammy in terms of pricing - the companies know people cling to their physical papers, so they charge outrageous subscription fees for a product that's about 1/50th what it used to be.
So funny that a lot of my newspaper angst has come down to -- how will I light my woodstove?! How will I keep weeds down in my veg beds?!
Yes, 1/50th of generalist smush without editorial categorization. If that function was actually done beyond 5 sections, it would dawn on editors they could expand each of those niches for hardcopy and feedback online from readers and tipsters interested enough to be drawn to that specialty info. Then greatest hits in that niche can make it to generalist pages or screens because of some universal human interest. Until then, detailed reporting is non-existent and generalist jive is of poor quality in content and it’s biased sources. So many internet providers in rural and desert Americs have bought out local newspapers to bolster their tv fare, unfortunately almost all just print government press releases and charge s few businesses for ads. No solutions for local problems by anything other than petty policy and a few charities.
No questioning of neglect by officialdumb no thoughts on gaining customers from tourists to new industries, just a non-functional status quo that is locally protected by their relatives or paid “public servants” who cover for neglect.
Without criticism, some small towns have no indexes of employees or contact info, no organization charts, no published budgets, and no links that ever work.
However, we intend to showcase best practices in competitive privatizing of services to ideation in new Intentional Communities. Data center folks against censorship are ignoring socialist bribes for rural internet and building their own. They seem supportive of samizdat’s in America. We’re organizing this at FreedomTVnetworks.com but aren’t forgetting the role of hardcopy niche newsprint to be good enough to be keepers.
In 1970, CH Hoiles, ageing publisher of 57 libertarian newspapers & 6 TV stations, allied with me as a 17-year old editor of an 8-page youth newspaper The New Horizon. I had challenged him to do niche marketing across his chain to create 517 newsprint magazines to support local to national newswrappers they would go in. I asked him to think about how many boat articles there are in the general smush sports pages among 3 major sports from high school to pro, when there are 17 boat magazines in any boat sales place. Further, we would ask existing subscribers and their family members exactly what types of newsprint magazines and frequency they would want as hardcopy keepers for ten-cents each. Higher interest would reduce the bulk being ignored as bird cage liners, and kept with a passion shared with other like-minded folks. Then we would collate them in a custom assembled bag, delivered to their doorstep.
Hardcopy still has a place.
Through 2 management and generational changes (the former one was trying to devalue the chain by refusing to do the newsprint magazine plan, and lost to generational owners, but it still was not implemented).
I advocated CH Hoiles and my plan for editorial and classified computerization, satellite or telex networked copy. He knew local news would die without other niche markets supporting it, with all the local possibilities for demonstrating freedom in common area management & maintenance (CAMM) using Volitional Science & Business he wrote editorials about. CH sent his reporters through Voli Sci courses by Jay Snelson; versus fascist business-government partnerships and socialist politicization of Social Science and Public /Police /Surveillance Administration.
Simple marketing was going to have a chance until in borrowing 40% of $1B from Blackstone & Providence Equity to sell the papers to the 3rd/4th generations, the Chinese Communists who supplied about 25 years ago 20% of Blackstone’s capital, ordered the CEO without board seats but quietly to pull their loans. Freedom Newspapers Inc. was surprised even as the most pragmatic of anti-communist anti-stateist papers in America. I did investigative reporting on why this was being pushed and went to the board, but they deemed it too late. Freedom Newspapers was sold off to cross town rivals for basically the price of paper rolls.
I continued to push for it to major buyers who didn’t quite know what to do, even as smorgasbord subscriber selected magazine services rise, even as I developed 2-way PhoneVoter TV Network in 1992, see PhoneVoter.us and todays FreedomTVnetworks.com/producers and interactive iTV networks ramping up in 2024: WomenLeading.info RViTV.com and DebateTourney.com
and ad agencies largely owned or managed by women get it. If you do, as I think so, say hello. There is still a place for hardcopy.
Really interesting, thank you for this. I know there were people in the trenches who saw what was coming, but the larger powers didn't listen and policymakers, etc, seem to see the loss of information to their benefit rather than a harm to all of us.
Thank You for replying. My original 1970 proposal showed a boy with a blocky mobile phone, a satellite receiver dish out his bedroom window, a newspaper sports section headline about the Indy 500, and the boys question being electro-typed to a reporter with a number and s story with s number: “What is a pole position?”
Hoiles had showed me his classified area with phosphor green screens compared to the manual and a few electric typewriters in the editorial rooms. It handled 375,000 local subscribers. He asked me what I saw as the difference between the two, and asked me for a proposal publisher to publisher.
I didn’t want his money and diverted a standing $1000 bounty for proving him wrong in his editorials to the local Young Americans for Freedom Orange County chapter I led, because they were doing things for liberty. I did allow him to send me through the V-50 course, by Jay Snelson, now on libertarianism.org or Liberty.me
That showed me how to creatively solve problems without force of law or military/police force. I became the nation’s expert on Percentage As You Earn %PAYEment finance & finansurance of Humane Investments (HI). See PAYEhome.org/tool-kit
%AYE Mutual Medical Finansurance for all in the free-market and Health Portal TV ramping up on HealthPortalHome.com
There are better ways to achieve more equality efforts and a middle class than governmentality. Grin.
Today, I am creating a Rockies to Wasatch Mountains Board of Trade, Tourism & Television. It will have a News Pool Bureau among all the neglected areas and small town newspapers among the radio & TV repeaters of general smush news. See R2W3T.org next week.
I am one of the leading advocates of all multi-subjective opinions welcome in 2-way reality TV. We are developing Mass Audience Response Systems (MARS) where each individual matters as a minority of one. MARS will empower (not tv/platform executives but) viewer-participants & parents to: filter, rate, label, warn, PhoneVote on a topic, a 2nd PhoneVote if some fool proposes force of law. 31 other types interactivity will engage and create 8 income streams where 1-way TV and newspapers only have 2 or 3 including subscriptions.
See other efforts in Environmental Prototype Intentional Communities (EPIC)s, that rely on media such as PahvantWALDC.com
I also at 17 learned from Robert LeFevre of the Freedom School and Freedom Newspapers. He wrote an anarcho-capitalist book Urbana that described “America’s Mist Wanted” on how without police, readers or viewers could assist security firms in tracking down criminals who committed only crimes against individuals, not any state.
I worked out with him a reprise of Ben Franklin’s percentage-of-income mutual firefighting Finansurance companies. See PAYEhome.org/experts
And I met the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL) that same year 1971. I became a co-founder of Liberty Internationale now in 90 nations & undergrounds. See Liberty-Intl.org
If you’d like to use your wisdom to advance best practices in networked showcased local news and Volitional solutions nationwide and globally, say hello. People can vote with their wallets every day instead of every 4 years for one size fits all politician-theives, I play well with socialists and class minded and inequity inequality concerned folks, yet usually have them beat with practical praxeology with better outcomes in freedom. Grin, Brock.FreedomiTV@protonmail.com
My hometown paper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, has had a journey as well.
WRT your town: have you ever been in the courthouse? If not, go there now, it's an amazing structure. I had a case there several years ago, and the judge bragged that the courthouse had cost more to build than the state capitol building. Beautiful interior stone imported from Italy, hauled by wagon up the hill from the rail depot. There was still a wooden toilet in the building a decade ago -- I don't know about now. That's what he told me, anyway. It's an emphasis on the physical that we just don't see any more. Buildings like the Gallatin County justice center is about all we're up for these days.
Ya, it's really beautiful. My mom worked in the courthouse for most of my childhood, so I've spent a lot of time there - just an incredible building.