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Rural newspapers are fighting to survive. So what happens when major news hits?

Pinedale Roundup Editor Cali O’Hare in front of the sign for the Pinedale Roundup newspaper
Melodie Edwards
/
Wyoming Public Media
Pinedale Roundup Editor Cali O’Hare now runs the 120-year-old paper by herself since her publisher laid off all her reporters.

Over the last 20 years, local news has seen massive consolidations as small town papers lost advertisers and were forced to sell to large corporations. In fact, nationwide, some 2,100 newspapers shut down since 2004, and 57 percent of newsroom staff have been laid off. When a newspaper loses half its staff it becomes what’s called a ghost paper.

“It's still printing,” said Steve Waldman, the president of the media advocacy organization Rebuild Local News. “It still has words and some pictures but it’s cut way back on local reporting.”

In Wyoming, three large corporations own over half of the local newspapers, including all of the largest circulations. But what happens when major news hits?

Back in April, Sublette County made international headlines when a man brought a wolf into a local bar, muzzled and injured. He’d run over it with a snowmobile and later killed it. Pinedale Roundup editor Cali O’Hare said she should’ve broken the story. But since then, she’s made up for lost time.

“Now we've covered it in great detail, and I've been boots on the ground for that,” she said.

But why wasn’t she the one to break it? Because last winter her publisher, News Media Corporation, laid off both her reporters, even a veteran who had worked there for 15 years. (The company didn’t respond to numerous requests by Wyoming Public Media for comment.)

Since then, O’Hare has been running the 120-year-old weekly newspaper by herself.

“I sure would have loved to have had a staff working on other stuff, because that [Sublette County wolf incident] took so much away from me.”

With a story with this much attention on it, she really wished she’d had an editor.

“It does make me nervous not having another set of eyes reading over my stuff, so I tend to read over it until I'm cross-eyed,” said O’Hare.

She also had to face the pushback from her reporting all alone.

“The county treasurer asked me to stop the coverage of the wolf,” O’Hare said. “An employee for the road and bridge department, Robert Binning, was saying that I'm a bitch on a witch hunt for a man's family.”

When a motorcycle rally came to town in late May to protest the wolf torture, protesters clashed with locals. A protester walked into town, crying and carrying a dead coyote she said she’d found on the side of the road, its mouth taped shut like the wolf’s. O’Hare said locals revved their engines and honked their horns to drown out her interviews. With her camera and microphone, she felt like a target.

“I went to that protest with a gun on my hip, a knife in my pocket,” said O’Hare.

“When local news contracts, it creates a vacuum. It's an information vacuum," Rebuild Local News’ Steve Waldman said. “The vacuum is filled by national media and social media. National media tends to be more partisan. So the contraction of local news leads to more polarization, more people demonizing each other.”

Waldman said there’s an antitrust case to be made by the federal government that corporate consolidation of local news is harming communities. He said numerous studies show real harm to communities from the collapse of local news, especially rural ones.

“Direct effects are things like, literally people don't have the information they need to decide who to vote for or to know what's going on at their school or to hold the government accountable,” said Waldman. “We know from studies and our own eyes that when there's less local reporting, there's less accountability and there's more corruption and there's worse city services. There was even a study that said in areas that you had less local news, you had lower bond ratings and higher taxes because there was less accountability and just more inefficiency.”

To combat these effects, his organization supports a bill introduced in Congress last year that would incentivize businesses to put ads in local papers to give them a more reliable funding stream.

“It's really clever,” he said. “The tax credit literally goes to restaurants and hardware stores and car dealerships if they advertise in local newspapers or radio.”

The bill would also give a payroll tax credit to newspapers to hire more local reporters. Waldman said the bill has 21 Republican co-sponsors and 21 Democrats. He encouraged Repr. Harriet Hageman (WY-R) to consider joining the effort, along with Wyoming’s senators, to help keep the state’s communities better informed and engaged.

That’s exactly what Pinedale Roundup’s Cali O’Hare hopes to do in Sublette County. Today, O’Hare was facing a very busy morning.

“I've got four pages left that I'm working on building before our deadline here. And then at 10, I have some of the folks from the Little League coming over, because, of course, now I'm a sports reporter, too.”

That’s not all she does.

“I do all the social media management, I do all the website management. I pay the bills to keep the lights on and the rent, the gas, the trash. Answer phones. Photographer.”

She does all that for a mere $41,000 a year. Truth is, though, lots of rural papers are going through the same thing. News Media Corporation owns over 150 publications in five states, 16 of them just in Wyoming. Across the U.S., many small town papers are getting gobbled up by hedge funds and private equity firms. So far, that hasn’t happened in Wyoming. Only the Casper Star Tribune is owned by a publicly traded company, Lee Enterprises.

After a couple of hours, the Pinedale Little League coach arrives for his interview.

“Hi! Nice to meet you,” O’Hare said, pointing out a chair in her office to get comfortable in.

It’s the little stories like this one that keep communities united, said O’Hare. While lots of other papers publish more and more press releases and national stories, she planned to keep writing original, locally-focused stories. That means the Pinedale Roundup won’t become a ghost paper anytime soon.

Melodie Edwards is the host and producer of WPM's award-winning podcast The Modern West. Her Ghost Town(ing) series looks at rural despair and resilience through the lens of her hometown of Walden, Colorado. She has been a radio reporter at WPM since 2013, covering topics from wildlife to Native American issues to agriculture.

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