Note: This article is one of several feature stories in a special issue about community media in the West.
The creation myth of the Crested Butte News goes like this: Back in April 2000, five young staffers from the Crested Butte Chronicle, the town’s venerable paper of record, sat exasperated in a Crested Butte bar. The beer flowed, and the lunch hour expanded into three hours. Eventually, the group decided to return to the office, clean out their desks, then walk out into the sunshine of economic uncertainty and start their own newspaper.
That’s the story I’d heard, anyway. “That’s not how it happened,” says Melissa Ruch, the News co-publisher, who boasts a journalism degree from the University of Indiana.
I am sitting at a wobbly “antique” (read: freebie) table in a second-story meeting room in the News’ Elk Avenue offices: A funky Victorian house-cum-office straight out of mountain-town-weekly-newspaper central casting. Desks and tables and computers are wedged into every available nook. Baled copies of the latest issue are stacked all over the place, awaiting distribution. Empty beverage cups abound. Ruch and two of the other founders, Than Acuff and Jill Claire Hickey, have met with me, despite the fact that all three were in the office until late last night getting the thick, three-section Labor Day issue to the printers. They’ve agreed to tell me the real story of how this feisty mountain-town newspaper came into being.
It turns out that, while the details may have been embellished, the main storyline holds. The staff (the three people sitting before me, along with Edward Stern and Tiffany Wardman) was indeed frustrated with the Chronicle, which was owned by American Consolidated Media, a Dallas-based chain that owns 40 papers, mainly in Texas and Oklahoma. The Chronicle had burned through two editors in less than two years, and the corporate suits had become increasingly intrusive.
“They told us we were going to start having department head meetings at 9 a.m. every Monday,” remembers Acuff, the News’ resident disheveled, gnarly mountain guy, who had worked for several years as a Chronicle staff writer. “We were told that, as department heads, we were supposed to meet with our respective staffs beforehand, then report those meetings to management at the Monday-morning meetings. Well, I was the sports editor and the only sports reporter, so I was supposed to have a pre-meeting with myself. It was getting absurd.”
The corporation was also putting profit over community — the biggest sin of all in the world of people who are blessed (or cursed) with whatever wild gene it is that makes otherwise sane individuals start small-town newspapers.
The chain was pushing for more national and international wire news at the expense of local stories. “It was increasingly apparent that they were looking at the Chronicle less as an important part of our community than they were as a source of revenue-generation,” Acuff says. “Words to them amounted to filler space between ads.”
There was even talk of moving the Chronicle’s design and production to the corporation’s centralized facility back East. “Half our staff, all of whom were friends and members of the community, would have lost their jobs,” says Hickey, a young mother of two who owned her own design and production company before signing on with the Chronicle. “It just seemed wrong for a community paper to have its production taking place on the other side of the country.”
The five co-founders of the News did not get drunk and quit in the middle of a work day, as I had heard. But they did make plans to abandon ship. And quietly, over a two-week period, they laid the foundation for the birth of the independently owned Crested Butte News.
“Edward had already given his notice at the Chronicle,” Ruch says. “We talked him into joining us. We each came up with $5,000. We wrote letters of resignation and, along with our keys, placed them on the publisher’s desk on a Friday. We launched the News the following week. The first issue was produced in Jill’s apartment.”
It is difficult to generalize about the origins of new local papers. We ought to begin by defining our terms. In the old hippie days, there was the “underground press,” which pretty much covered anything of interest to people who smoked lots of pot. The staying power of the underground press was, well, predictable.
This evolved into the “alternative press,” which was usually characterized by local incarnations of Rolling Stone: Heavy on entertainment, personalities and the kind of journalism that didn’t necessarily adhere to traditional journalistic mores, such as factual verification. Today’s “alt-weeklies” cover the stylistic and compositional gamut, but tend toward leftiness, with a heavy dose of environmentalism, personality profiles and entertainment-as-lifestyle.
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The term “independent media” surfaced as chains began to gobble up both traditional and “alternative” newspapers. Today, independent media come in a wilderness of varieties. In print media, you’ve got frequency issues (anywhere from “daily” to “occasionally”), as well as a variety of concepts and execution. Many independent publications, such as the North Coast Journal in Arcata, Calif., are published by longtime journalists with a penchant toward heavy investigative work. Others, like the Steamboat Local in Steamboat, Colo., are published by print-media neophytes out to provide a voice for local citizens, while leaving town council and school board meetings to the established papers of record.
What these “indie” papers generally have in common is the fact that they were created in reaction to something. These days, that “something” often takes the form of chain-owned publications, which are to community journalism what chain restaurants are to a community’s culinary scene. Some people don’t mind that their local eating-out options are limited to McDonald’s and Chili’s and the Black-eyed Pea. And many people don’t mind that their local paper is owned and operated by a corporation headquartered in a different state, with no ties to the local community save the fact that it owns the paper.
But there are other people who do care, and, when the planets align in a rare and certain way, those people act.
Deciding to create a new paper, of course, doesn’t mean that said new paper will succeed. Any new paper, even one produced by longtime local journalists, requires a dedication nearly unimaginable to those not involved in the business.
Simultaneously, the five people who founded the Crested Butte News had to locate office space; procure furniture and computers (much of it donated by supportive locals); locate a press (for the first year, the owners took turns driving the paper three hours to Salida, waiting for the copies to be printed, then driving home late at night along wintry mountain roads, the papers stacked to the roof of their cars); find part-time jobs that could sustain them until the paper started making money; then, most importantly, convince advertisers that they were for real.
At the same time, the five partners had to develop a business structure for the new paper. Hickey naturally took over layout and design duties. But the other four partners were all editorial people. “I took over the business end of things,” Hickey says. “I had no business experience, but I focused on learning everything I could. We each pitched in on delivery. The editorial people lived for most of a year without sleep because we wanted to cover everything, to get every story we possibly could into the paper.”
Remarkably, the Crested Butte News was, from day one, a “real” paper. It was not a left-leaning, anti-all-development rag, as many new independent papers are. It did not carry a torch for Ralph Nader and dedicate 12 pages in every issue to hemp. It was not a gossip sheet. It was not focused almost exclusively on entertainment, with a side order of police blotter.
“My goal as editor, and it was shared with Melissa, was to bring the paper from left to center,” says Stern, who worked in the magazine business in New York before moving to Crested Butte a decade ago. “Just give smart people the information they need, and you’ll have a smart town.
“This wasn’t about big stories,” Stern continues. “It was about the right stories and having more of them. We knew what stories were worth running in a way that a Dallas newspaper chain never could. While they were running suburb-style petty theft or sales tax stories, we were covering the ongoing 30-year fight to mine Mount Emmons or the 14-year battle over the Union Park water storage proposal.”
This attitude earned the News credibility. Within 10 months, the paper began to turn the corner that most new papers take three or more years to turn (if ever): It was making a small profit.
Then, unexpectedly and almost unbelievably, American Consolidated Media put the Chronicle on the market. Pulling money out of their savings and borrowing more from relatives, the News owners bought the paper they had all jumped ship from. The new, consolidated paper would be called the Crested Butte News/Chronicle & Pilot (the Pilot being a paper that the Chronicle long ago acquired).
“Purchasing the Chronicle meant that we were suddenly the paper of record in Crested Butte,” Ruch says. “That meant we got all the legal advertising, which really helped.”
Despite the paper’s newly acquired monopoly status, the new owners did not raise their advertising rates. (Most chains would have doubled their ad rates overnight.) And Ruch, Hickey, Acuff, Stern and Wardman refused to lower their journalistic standards.
“Stern and Company put out a much better newspaper than I did when I was doing the newspaper in Crested Butte,” says George Sibley, who owned and operated The Chronicle from early ’68 to late ’71, and now teaches journalism at nearby Western State College. “It’s a lot bigger paper, and quite a bit more respectable in terms of actual journalism — although they might not have had quite as much fun as I did.
“Edward seemed to have no visible agenda other than trying to keep an often-polarizing town together, with everyone talking to everyone else,” Sibley adds. “It’s hard in a one-industry town to retain the respect and participation of both The Company and those who don’t like The Company, but he and his crew walked that line pretty well.”
And the News has always been a paper that understood its community clear down to the DNA-level.
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“The Chronicle thought they could win readers by putting in cheap filler like the ‘Simpsons Quote of the Week contest’ or ‘Pet of the Month,’ ” Stern says. “Knowing the Crested Butte audience, we decided that, instead of putting something equally shallow in, we’d create a column covering world news briefs and a column that tracked public companies’ stocks that had a local connection.
“On the flip side,” Stern continues, “we also knew that this community wanted to keep things weird, so we continued our coverage of things like ‘Expedition Boy,’ a character designed to mock our community’s ‘extreme’ obsession.”
This would be a good place for a happy ending, something like, “Even in a chain-dominated world, there are success stories. Viva la independent media!” But the story doesn’t end here. In January 2005, the founders of the Crested Butte News sold the paper. To an out-of-state chain.
“It just got to the point that the tension was getting too great,” Ruch says. “Than had already taken a year off, though he’s back now. Eddie was burning out fast. It’s a lot of pressure to make payroll and to get a quality product out the door every day. And we were so tired all the time.”
It may sound whiny, and perhaps a tad hypocritical, but be not too hasty to rush to judgment.
The News hired a business broker, and established a strict set of criteria for prospective buyers. “It had to be someone we felt comfortable with, someone who would respect our love of the community,” Hickey says.
The right group, Stevenson Newspapers out of Sheridan, Wyo., walked in the door. The chain, co-owned by the Stevenson and Hicks families, owns two dailies and 11 weeklies in Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, Oregon and, now, Colorado.
“They had better offers, but they chose to sell to us because they recognized our understanding that the best papers reflect their communities,” says Gary Stevenson, a principal in Crested Butte News Inc. (All of the papers in the Stevenson chain are run by independent subsidiary corporations.) “We do not subscribe to a cookie-cutter philosophy.”
“They have not interfered with our operations at all, except to be positive and supportive,” Ruch says. “They understand that we are a family, and this paper is our baby.”
And what if things start getting bad, in the way that things so often do when a chain comes to town? The staff signed a no-compete agreement — meaning that, if they grow dissatisfied, they can’t walk out like they did in April 2000 and start their own paper. But that agreement applies only to the current owners of Crested Butte News Inc. Should those owners sell the company, the no-compete would no longer apply.
“There is an understanding that we started a new paper once, we can do it again,” Hickey says.
So perhaps this is a happy ending after all. The founders of the Crested Butte News came, they saw, they conquered, and they did it every step of the way on their own terms. They succeeded because they put community first and set high standards. They learned a lot, and they have a few lessons to share.
“I would say to someone looking to start a local paper: Go for it, and don’t look back,” Ruch says. “And remember, you are a journalist, but you’ve now become a businessperson too.”
“Be honest,” Stern says simply.
“And,” adds Ruch, “be prepared to not sleep for a long time.”
M. John Fayhee is the editor of Mountain Gazette and author of eight books. He just moved back to New Mexico’s Gila Country after 24 years in Colorado.
The following sidebar articles accompany this feature story:
Stirring the pot – The North Coast Journal has been published in Arcata, Calif., for almost 18 years by Judy Hodgson, a journalist who believes in stirring the pot
A paper with bite – The Taos Horse Fly, with its biting journalism, does its best to live up to its name
News from the gas fields – Roughneck is a two-year-old monthly devoted to covering the oil and gas industry in Sublette County, Wyoming
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline From the ground up.
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