My fingers pounded on the
sticky keyboard. It was 2 a.m.; I’d given up drinking coffee a few
hours earlier and was now chewing coffee beans chased with
chocolate chips. In less than five hours, I’d make the 50-mile
drive over two high mountain passes to the printer’s in Durango, in
western Colorado, fretting the whole way about what I’d left out,
the mistakes I’d made and who I’d probably libeled.
It
was hour 18 of yet another 20-hour pre-print-day haul on the
Silverton Mountain Journal, the newspaper I’d
started nine months earlier. I covered San Juan County’s 387
square-miles, one incorporated town, fewer than 600 people and,
during the six months of winter, approximately 15 potential
advertisers. That’s not enough to sustain one newspaper. Yet the
Journal was the second paper in town, the upstart next to the
Silverton Standard & the Miner, which had
fought off a half-dozen other competitors during its lifetime and
had survived bust after bust as gold and other hard rock mines
closed.
Launching a second newspaper in Silverton was
irresponsible, insane and idealistic. Why did I do it? Part of it
probably had to do with romantic notions associated with being a
small-town newspaper editor. Deeper down, I felt that my community,
small though it was, deserved more than it was getting from the
existing news outlet.
And there you have the spark behind
most grassroots media startups: Someone sees a need in the
community — for information, or creativity, or inspiration,
or journalistic energy, or just basic truth-telling — and he
or she steps in and does his best to fill it.
This
happened as the West was settled, and seems to keep on happening as
newer people arrive. The same month that I set up a used computer
and printer in a grungy office in the former Miners Union Hospital
in Silverton, four employees of the Crested Butte
News walked off the job in that Colorado mountain town.
Then they started a competing publication. Down in Taos, N.M., the
previous year, Bill Whaley launched the Taos Horse
Fly to fill gaps in local coverage left by the
establishment paper. In just about every region in the West there’s
at least one alternative publication available; in cyberspace,
ranters and journalists are starting blogs and Web sites to cover
left out aspects of the West’s news.
Technology deserves
a lot of credit for facilitating these grassroots media efforts.
These days, all it takes to launch a publication is a computer and
enough cash to foot the first issue’s printing bill, and even
that’s not necessary for a blog or Website. That, and something
important to say, and, of course, enough coffee to get you through
saying it. Silverton had as many as three competing newspapers at a
time during its mining heyday, each with its own viewpoint,
printing press and printing “devils” to set lead type.
Most of these grassroots publishing efforts died early deaths.
Economic capital dwindles fast when reporting comes before business
interests; and creative resources peter out under the workload
required to put out a weekly or even a monthly. But in a world
where giant media conglomerates continually gobble up the little
guys in the name of profit, even the briefest lives of grassroots
media are important. If nothing else, they keep the big guys on
edge: No one knows who’s going to come along next ready to start a
new paper. That threat, no matter how small, keeps the established
press on edge, hopefully resulting in a better product.
Three years after starting the Mountain Journal,
I bought the 127-year-old “mainstream” paper. But after a few more
years of single-handedly producing a weekly newspaper for miniscule
wages, I’d had enough. I searched in vain for someone like me to
take over. Eventually, I sold my paper to a national chain that
owns hundreds of other papers across the country.
“You’ve
done this community a great injustice,” a woman told me when I
returned to Silverton recently. I can’t blame her: Who wants the
voice of their community to be controlled by outsiders who live far
away? But it’s not enough to just sing a dirge for the loss of
independent, community-based media. People who want a local voice
need to stand up and do something crazy — like starting up a
newspaper of their very own.
Jonathan Thompson
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is the paper’s
associate editor in Paonia, Colorado.
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