Wyoming dodged a bullet when Robb and Jenn Hicks and Rob Mortimer bought and reopened the local newspapers of eight locales. I thank them, and I wish them well.
I live in one of those towns. So, I personally felt the shock of the shutdown. I was stunned as I got off a plane in St. Louis and opened my phone to see the news. It came from a colleague who texted it to our little group of Evanston pastors.
Immediately, I shared the news with my daughter. Her first job out of college was as a reporter for the Uinta County Herald. Next, I thought about all the other people that I care about who worked for these papers. After thinking of the employees, I began to think of the communities themselves.
That’s when reality started sinking in.
Small-town America is already under intense pressure to be homogenized into the national discourse. Just as big box stores and national restaurant chains have sucked the charm out of local shopping and dining, corporate news dilutes our shared interests.
Angry and frightful national headlines - designed as clickbait - suck all of the local oxygen out of the room. They demand that we take sides, rant and rave about things that we have practically no power to change. They dissipate our energy and distract our attention away from the things that we can control.
That is the real tragedy of small-town life. Most townsfolk know practically nothing of what is happening on their local school board or city council. But they can recite every detail of distant scandals and the outrage du jour.
Local newsprint can affect this phenomenon for good or for ill. The mere existence of a local paper is no measure of community health. It should also be a healthy part of the community.
So, while Wyoming should be grateful that eight Wyoming newspapers have been rescued from extinction, we should take the opportunity to understand what led them to the precipice and how we can put them on firmer ground.
No small part of the problem was that the local owner of these newspapers sold them to foreign interests in the first place. In a sense, we lost our local papers years ago—when they became the property of a corporation in Rochelle, Illinois.
When the financial center of gravity moved 1,200 miles east, local accountability went with it. Editors and publishers must answer to their corporate overlords. But those overlords don’t have to answer to local readers.
I never once saw one of these owners at the local supermarket or chatted with one at Pete’s coffee shop. Such distance creates a disconnect between communities and their papers.
When a community feels like the local paper hates its values, the people will return the favor. No longer are they in partnership and dialogue, but adversaries. Papers that become loudspeakers blasting a foreign ideology are no longer able to hear local voices.
No business can long survive in hostility with its customer base. Over time this disconnect hollows out the subscription base which, in turn, makes it increasingly difficult for local businesses to justify buying advertisements.
Now that the Hicks and the Mortimers have reinvested Wyoming dollars into Wyoming papers, I am hopeful that this dynamic will be reversed.
So, speaking for all of us who meet at Pete’s: Welcome to Evanston! We want to see you make a profit and build a legacy. Come visit us. We would love to show you the local attractions.
We are hopeful that our local businesses will be overwhelmed by customers who saw their ad in the Herald. We will rejoice when Evanston’s citizens understand and care about the issues that affect their children and grandchildren—not merely the rage-baiting of national politics.
Above all, we crave a local paper that unites our little community and not one that further divides. Here, I am speaking primarily as a pastor.
Pastors are the ones on the front lines who have to deal with the fallout of our divisive age. We see broken families, depression, anxiety, and a thousand medical pathologies related to stress.
Because of all this, we have a vested interest in anything that can enhance honest and kind communication between neighbors. Since God has called us to share this city’s streets and infrastructure, He has also called us to care for one another.
Speaking the truth in love is the way that God builds love and community. That’s why, within hours of getting home from my trip, I was sitting in the local coffee shop exploring ways to respond to the closure of our local paper.
It’s not just politically important. It’s a spiritual matter. May God bless your investment in our community.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
