Pinedale Roundup, which covers the news and community of Sublette County weekly and online, was recently chosen as one of five rural papers for a program meant to help them reimagine their business model, adopting tools like e-newsletters and a Press Club, increasing the price of the paper, and adding more local photos and columns.
Over three months, the paper is looking to make big, sustainable changes to make its work more relevant and accessible to the community.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Melodie Edwards sat down with the paper’s editor, Cali O’Hare, and Teri Finneman with Reviving Rural News, a program built from a book of the same title that Finneman wrote with co-authors. Finneman is a professor of journalism at the University of Kansas.
Editor's Note: This story has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Melodie Edwards: Teri, to start, do you mind talking a little bit about how this program came about and how it works?Teri Finneman: About four years ago, I received some grant funding to do a media innovation project. We ended up working with a newspaper in Kansas to reinvent their business model. We know that over 3,000 newspapers have closed in the United States in the last 20 years. It is critical, we felt, that academia step in and do something to help.
Pinedale is now the fifth newspaper that I'm working with in the Midwest. I also worked with papers in Nebraska and North Dakota, and so far it's been a very successful program, bringing in substantial new revenue for all of these papers, and again, really deepening the relationship with the communities.ME: And Cali, how did you end up getting involved in this program?
Cali O'Hare: We were at the Wyoming Press Association 127th Annual Convention in January, and I sat through Teri's class one morning called Reviving Rural News. I was just blown away by the presentation and everything I was hearing. She had this opportunity for us: We could put in for three months of free consulting. I was very quick to scribble “Pinedale Roundup, Cali O'Hare” on my little slip of paper and toss our name into the hat for consideration. Then I think it was later that afternoon, at lunch, we found out that we had been selected.ME: Teri, why did you choose the Pinedale Roundup?TF: It was a unique newspaper for me to work with compared to the other ones because of what happened to them last year. The fact that they suddenly closed just overnight. Their ownership just closed a series of papers over multiple states. So their community saw the threat of what would happen if the newspaper was gone. [I thought], okay, this is a community that should be open to [asking], ‘What can we do to make sure that this doesn't happen again?’
ME: What I've found really interesting about this program is that you're helping these newspapers develop a different business model. Sounds like one of the first things is to double the price of the paper.TF: Yeah, and so doubling the price, that sounds really scary. But literally, when you're only paying a dollar, there is nowhere to go but up. I challenge people: How many of your businesses charge a dollar for anything? You can't even go to a gas station and buy a candy bar. The last time I was there, it cost me $2.79 cents for a candy bar, and that's literally machine produced in seconds. Whereas your weekly newspaper took a hundred-plus manual labor hours to put out. We have to change our mindset for what is actually valuable. The same businesses that are urging people, you have to shop local, are then turning around and advertising on Facebook rather than supporting another local business: your local newspaper.
I've been very thrilled that Pinedale is open to this bigger concept of Press Club – which not all papers have been open to – which is allowing for larger donations. We know that there are people who have an investment in local news who have more resources to pay, and opening up this concept of allowing people to donate to help their newspaper is really important.
Now, concerns that come up, and they’re valid concerns to think about, is, ‘Does this mean that somebody's buying press, that suddenly we're gonna have their slant in the paper?’ It's just a matter of being crystal clear that just because you donate does not mean we're suddenly gonna give you all the positive coverage in the world. This is not how this works here, okay? So it is establishing those parameters from the get-go.
Another thing that is part of the model is e-newsletters. Weekly newspapers are still acting like it's the 1800s in the horse and buggy era, where news can just come out once a week, and that's sufficient. That does not work in 2026 when we are literally getting information by the second from every other place on the planet except for your local newspaper. So the e-newsletter allows newspapers to communicate with readers on a more frequent basis.
ME: You guys have recently done some focus groups. Can you tell me a little bit about why you started there and what kind of participation you ended up getting, and how did it go?TF: It was great. We do reader surveys and focus groups as part of this [program]. I had more people fill out the reader survey in Pinedale than any of my other places, which really showed the enthusiasm and interest in their local newspaper.
But what was particularly striking is how many non-subscribers filled it out. That tells me that there is a large contingent of people who are very interested in local news, but would like to see some changes made to better reflect what they're hoping for from the media today. CO: I think what's been encouraging to hear from the public is that there is still this support, there is still this understanding, and they're willing to hear our story. They know what we went through over the summer. They know how on a Wednesday morning, we just shuttered our doors, and we were almost lost. We wouldn't have fought so hard for the Pinedale Roundup if we didn't think that this community really deserved to be able to keep its legacy newspaper. So as we're getting all of this feedback still in the early stages, we're considering everything.
One of the things I'm most excited about is the concept of a Readers Board. That's really gonna be key for the community and for keeping that communication open between folks and us.
Editor’s Note: Readers Boards assemble 10 or so people every few months to discuss the newspaper’s progress as a way to create community investment.TF: It's also an opportunity to provide media literacy, because the media industry as a whole has changed so rapidly, even the last 10 years, that for a lot of people it's very difficult for them to understand the difference between what's real news and what's actual fake news. [The Reader’s Board] is just a good opportunity to better explain what it is that we do. That we're not enemies of the people, that we are actually really hardworking servants who think that this is a public service, and we're really trying to help our towns. The reader's board is just a really great opportunity to bring all of those things together.ME: I'm curious to hear, now that you have gotten this feedback, where you have started. Are you feeling a little overwhelmed by the task at hand, Cali?CO: I will say that while it is a seemingly overwhelming process, Teri has done a really good job of breaking it down into bite size pieces for us. Teri applied for and received funding for us from the Wyoming Community Foundation Press Forward, so we're able to pay for an intern – hopefully a college student studying journalism – to come over the summer to have a 10-week internship here with us, boost our reporting and our on-the-ground coverage of some really important things that we have going on in the summer months.
We're working on putting an ad together for a paid reporter as well, as part of this process. We're looking at all of those ways where we can get a bump of revenue that can be reinvested back into the paper to improve its quality for our readers. But I think there'll be a lot of exciting news coming from the Roundup itself, as we look at our business model and change it over the next several weeks and months to come. It's an exciting time for us and our community.
