Small-town publishers return to stave off demise of oldest weekly paper in Nebraska
The Pawnee Republican is the oldest continuously published weekly newspaper in the state, but needs a new owner. (Paul Hammel/Nebraska Examiner)
PAWNEE CITY, Nebraska — The front page story in a recent edition of the Pawnee Republican solved a local mystery — what happened to the grass-fire rig stolen from the Burchard Fire Department?
But the bigger mystery in this southeast Nebraska farm town of 855 people is who’s going to take over the newspaper, the longest continuously published weekly publication in the state?
Five years after selling the Pawnee Republican, Ron and Bev Puhalla came back to take over after the buyer of the paper quit suddenly. With them is the paper’s mascot, Prairie Star. (Paul Hammel/Nebraska Examiner)
Longtime owners Bev and Ron Puhalla thought they had ensured the future of the Republican in 2019 when they sold it. They jumped into a mobile home and traveled the United States to catch up on the sights they had missed during the weekly chores of putting out a community newspaper.
New owner quit
But after the new owner quit suddenly in October, they found themselves back inside the homey office, with their dog sleeping behind the front window, just off Pawnee City’s town square.
Since then, they’ve been laboring to pay off bills, restore files and overall resurrect the last remaining paper in Pawnee County.
“We didn’t want to see the town lose its newspaper,” Bev Puhalla said.
“I mean, who’s going to tell the story when all the sheriff’s deputies threaten to quit on January 1 because they haven’t gotten a raise?” she asked. “Who’s going to tell that story?”
It’s a question being asked at a lot of community newspapers across the country and in Nebraska these days.
Plenty of headwinds are facing local papers these days.
Betty Davis, the longtime office manager and advertising chief at the Pawnee Republican, kept at her post, even after the owner announced suddenly that she didn’t need to show up for work the next day. (Paul Hammel/Nebraska Examiner)
Advertising has migrated to social media and there are fewer mom-and-pop retailers on main streets to buy ads. Young people don’t read papers like their parents did. Expenses have risen and mail service has gotten slower.
Postage costs have risen sharply in the past two years, and postal service changes mean that some western Nebraska newspapers have to be shipped to Denver to be mailed, rendering some of the news, when it does arrive, outdated.
Business getting harder
In addition, it’s harder to find a printing press to publish a paper — the Pawnee paper is printed in Missouri, and many northeast Nebraska papers are shipped to Iowa — and it’s getting more and more difficult to hire staff for the hard work and the less-than-lucrative paychecks in newspapering.
“The media business has always been hard, and it’s harder than ever now,” said Ellen Clegg, a former editorial page editor at the Boston Globe and co-author of the book, “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts and the Future of the Fourth Estate.”
Last year, an average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week, according to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. More than 211 counties across the country — about 7% of all counties — now have no newspapers, creating “news deserts,” and another 228 are at risk of losing their paper.
In Nebraska, 10 weekly and daily newspapers have closed during the past three years, leaving the state with 146 newspapers. Nine counties, including suburban Cass County just outside Omaha and Lincoln, have no newspapers. Some daily newspapers have cut staff and stopped publishing every day of the week.
Gone are longtime papers like the Greeley Citizen, the Ralston Recorder, the Papillion Times, the Plattsmouth Journal and the Spaulding Enterprise. These were papers that chronicled the history of prairie towns, the tornadoes and floods, reports on who got a ticket from the sheriff last week, who got married and who died, and whether the local sports teams won or lost.
Who are the next generation of owners?
Dennis DeRossett, the executive director of the Nebraska Press Association, the organization of the state’s newspapers, said some of the decline in recent years was due to mergers. Sarpy and Greeley Counties, for instance, are now served by a single newspaper instead of two or three.
Dennis DeRossett, executive director of the Nebraska Press Association (Courtesy of the Nebraska Press Association)
But the loss of papers, and the difficulty in finding new owners, prompted the NPA to hold a strategic planning meeting about the future of the local press.
The goal, DeRossett said, was to identify the next generation of community newspaper owners and how the NPA might be able to help them.
“If you’re out in a rural county, who are you going to get to take over a paper?” DeRossett said.
It’s an important question, with lots of implications.
When a town loses a newspaper, it loses a part of its identity, as well as an important institution that helps hold the fabric of a community together.
Longtime Pawnee City attorney Joe Stehlik said it was a “crisis” when the Republican was on the brink of closing.
A ‘critical’ institution
“It’s one of the most critical storefronts we have in town, right up there with the hospital and the school,” Stehlik said. “We can do without a laundromat, and have done without different things. But a newspaper? You just gotta have that communication within a community.”
Studies have shown that when a town loses its newspaper, engagement in local affairs declines, as does voting and the number of candidates for public office. Corruption also increases, according to the Medill School’s “State of Local News” report in 2022.
Clegg pointed out that newspapers are the only “non-government organization” mentioned in the U.S. Constitution and that James Madison envisioned lots of news outlets in America.
Local newspapers, she said, also can be a hedge against the “hyper-partisanship” of politics in the country.
“Readers are more likely to trust local news,” she said. “They see the editor around town, the reporter at town council meetings, and have worked with them in writing an obituary.”
“That helps foster trust,” Clegg said.
And, she said, people live their lives “locally.”
People care about local news
“They care about whether the local middle school is being repaired, they care about taxes, and if the streets are plowed,” Clegg said.
Lately, there’s been a “nationalization” of the news, she said, where people get most of their information from “pundits” on news talk shows or Facebook posts, rather than from “fact-based” stories produced by trained journalists.
Mystery solved: Stolen grass rig recovered in Bennett. (Paul Hammel/Nebraska Examiner)
At Pawnee City, Bev and Ron Puhalla had to reorganize a cluttered newspaper office, resurrect billings and pay off past-due bills as well as unpaid salaries of the paper’s part-time office manager and sports reporter.
“It was like someone handed us a ball of barbed wire,” Bev said.
“We’ve got a lot of work left,” said Ron Puhalla, in getting computer systems back up to snuff and just clearing out debris.
The couple, both 74 years of age, aren’t taking any salary from the operation, but they say there have been some encouraging signs since their return — a truck stop run by natives of Pawnee City is a new advertiser, there’s a new history column in the paper, and several cards of thanks are posted behind the front counter.
Circulation, both in print and online, is holding steady at 728, which, three years ago, topped 1,100.
Puhallas ‘saved the day’
“The Puhallas swooped in and saved the day,” said Stehlik, the local attorney.
They got some local funding, outside of their advertising and circulation revenue, which Clegg said is one strategy that’s being employed to help local papers make it.
A local business group, the Pawnee County Development Corporation, provided a three-month grant to get the Republican back on its feet.
Clegg, who helped start a nonprofit newspaper last year in Brookline, Massachusetts, said the nonprofit model probably works best in urban areas, where there are more sources for donations.
But a “hybrid” model, where a newspaper is partly funded by a local foundation or nonprofit, is working in nearby Iowa. That is where the Storm Lake Times Pilot has received grants from the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to supplement the paper’s income.
“The trick is convincing people who give to hospitals and the art museum they they should be thinking of giving to media, too,” she said.
Several national foundations, Clegg added, have also risen up to provide funds for community newspapers. And nonprofit, digital-only news sites are popping up across the country including in Nebraska to fill the void, such as the Nebraska Examiner and Flatwater Free Press.
DeRossett of the Nebraska Press Association said he expects to see more nonprofits, more mergers of community newspapers and more one-paper counties.
Overall, he said, he has some optimism. He recently fielded a phone call from a couple interested in buying a paper somewhere in Nebraska.
And, he added, when the publisher of the Genoa Leader-Times, Mary Kay Johnson, died unexpectedly in January, a friend, Tonya Evans of the Colfax County Press, stepped in to keep the paper going until a new buyer can be found.
Survival, DeRossett said, “will depend on how bad the local community really wants its local newspaper? Are they willing to support it?”
‘Will the community rally’?
“Will the community rally around and find an owner within its own boundaries?” he added.
Clegg noted that every community is different, and her advice to the Puhallas of the world is not to give up.
“You’re doing important work, and it’s hard to find the formula that works,” she said. “But don’t lose hope — it’s too important.”
Bev Puhalla said one potential prospect to buy the Republican has emerged but has family obligations that probably prevents them from taking over right away. Until then, she and her husband are getting the paper back on solid footing so a new owner could step right in.
“One good thing about coming back this year is that it’s an election year,” Puhalla added. “Campaign ads are coming in the door.”
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