The guest column reprinted from The Denver Gazette (see below) does hit the ball out of the park. Roy Robinson, who sent me the guest column this week, is a lifelong friend. He worked at The Lamar Daily News in 1962 when my wife Gerri, and I started our newspaper careers in Craig with the Northwest Colorado Press.
That year, we visited Denver for our first Colorado Press Association convention at the Brown Palace Hotel. Newspapers were flying high in those days. We were excited to meet our future newspaper family of career friends with ink in our veins that we have now known for decades. No more conventions at the Brown Palace, but smaller boutique hotels with this year’s event in a new Northglenn hotel Aug. 24-25.
Entering the Brown Palace Hotel ballroom for the first time, a cowboy dude was leaning against the entrance wall, enjoying his last cigarette, one boot and his back leaning against the wall as if he was lighting up. I said, “Hello,” and he responded. It was Roy Robinson who recently concluded a lengthy career in the newspaper business, leaving The Lamar Daily News and running his father’s newspaper in Cripple Creek for a decade before gaming. Moving on, he worked for Denver Post magnate Dean Singleton, running his Graham, Texas newspaper, where Dean started his career as a paperboy and built a newspaper empire with Roy’s Texas help. Roy rose to the top in Colorado as a past president of Colorado Press and went on to Texas to lead the 600-member Texas Press Association as president. Our paths continued to cross over decades serving on Colorado Press committees together and later both active in the National Newspaper Association.
Today, Roy is back in Colorado, having lost Carol Lee, his bride of many years, but close to his family. Retired, but not quite, he volunteers for the Colorado Rockies baseball team during the baseball season. We enjoy monthly luncheons together with some other newspaper friends.
During Colorado Press membership, I became friends with our staff member, award-winning editor, friend and colleague, Becky Osterwald, who once published her own Hugo Eastern Colorado Plainsman along the Colorado/Kansas border for 18 years before selling, now one of the newspapers that has closed along with a raft of other newspapers across the state that have lost their will, along with their newspaper printing plants. Gannett closed Bob Rawling’s Pueblo Chieftain printing facility with 70 community newspapers in Pueblo. And now Alden, owner of the Denver Post, is closing the 90-plus newspaper Berthoud printing plant, once owned by the Lehman family Longmont/Loveland newspaper group for decades. Ed and Ruth are both DU law school graduates. The Post will move their 18 newspapers to the Denver plant where they print the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph and The Pueblo Chieftain, et al. They would continue to print the newspaper as long as it was in a broadsheet format. That would be the page size of the current Denver Post.
The good news is we have another printer that can print our newspapers in tabloid size before you but will also address the labels and make deliveries. The bad news is that it is going to cost more money. We’ve been with The Denver Post Berthoud printing plant for many years. They’ve done a great job, a few hiccups, but always on time, rain or shine, color on every page, and they get the computer mail list right —most of the time.
It will be a new experience as we adjust to a new printer, and we’re working out test runs of the complex computer files this week.
We are not on the list of closing newspapers. We forge on with many loyal subscribers and advertisers supporting us. It is in our blood, and we love what we do.
We recently learned that the 162-year-old The Weekly Register-Call, oldest weekly newspaper in Colorado, has won 10 awards for the mountain newspaper in Gilpin County. While its sister newspaper, The Villager in Arapahoe County, has won 15 awards.
Don’t Cry for Me Argentina flows through my mind as I write this saga about newspapers. It isn’t just the newspapers that have closed in these communities but the grocery stores, car dealerships, drug stores, banks and hardware stores. The automobile is partially to blame, along with the rise of the chain stores. Rural America has especially changed, so don’t just shed tears for newspapers but for those local merchants and soda fountain memories from family firms that served us so well for so long.
THANKS, ROY, for all those years of friendship. I’m glad know that you quit smoking. See you soon for lunch, when we can commiserate with our old newspaper pals.
Guest Column
By Vince Bzdek
Reprinted from The Denver Gazette
There’s an old saying that a newspaper is a town talking to itself.
So, what happens to a town, I wonder, that stops talking to itself?
What happens when a town loses its soul? “A good town helps make a good newspaper, and a good newspaper helps make a good town.” My dad once wrote about the Brush News-Tribune, which printed its very last edition last week after a grand 139-year run. My dad, mom, granddad and grandma owned and operated that paper for 50 of those 139 years. Its loss is like a death in the family combined with a rip in the universe, one I’m not sure we’ll ever really recover from. I worry that the town may not either. All five of my brothers and sisters worked on that paper at one time or another, doing a little bit of everything. If we wanted dinner, we had to sweep the floors, develop pictures, run the job presses, write stories, review movies, deliver papers, and sell ads. My brothers and sisters and I once stuffed about 1,000 papers into chicken wire to create a Brush News-Tribune float for the annual Fourth of July parade, and instead of candy, we all threw papers out to people lining the streets.
We also had some serious fun putting out those 7,748 editions of the Brush News-Tribune. My brother Jay and his band, Purple Haze, used to practice in the backroom of that newspaper. When my friends and I hung around for a listen, we’d stash our beers in the darkroom refrigerator used to store film. Don’t tell dad.
Printer foreman Dick Shriner and I got in trouble once when I was printing a poster on the old plate press in the backroom. Before my dad threw them away and made me start over, my posters said this:
Brush Turkey Shoot
9 shots standing
9 shots sitting
9 shits lying down.
My grandfather regularly put an ad in the paper after Christmas telling people they could bring their old Christmas Trees to a particular address and dump them on the lawn. He’d pick a different friend’s address every year without telling them. My dad once went on an editorial page crusade to get Brush wired for cable TV and won. I believe he was motivated partly by a desire to watch his hometown Chicago Cubs games, but, hey, the whole town benefited from his passion for the Cubs. We, kids, used to all gather around when Shriner occasionally fired up the old linotype machine in the back office for a printing job. He’d sit there before that hulking, 100-year-old behemoth like he was conducting an orchestra of levers, chains, rollers and springs. A young kid could get hooked on the newspaper biz by watching that hot-type monster print a page. Dick always told me the machine had 36,000 moving parts, and the inventor went insane. My mom worked the front office for the longest time, greeting the whole community as it flowed in and out of our doors, listening to their gripes, collecting their kids’ sports scores, and handling their obits. She’s the one who hired the painter who dressed up our windows every year with bunting and cowgirls for the World’s Largest Amateur Rodeo during the Fourth of July.
The nuts and bolts of what happens when a community loses its newspaper have been well-documented. The cost of government goes up because no one is the watchdog of the spending by politicians. People participate less in municipal elections because they don’t know what’s going on, so a smaller handful of people, often with their interests in mind rather than the town’s, end up running the town. Folks start getting all their information from social media, which is notoriously unreliable when it comes to things like facts and the truth.
But what about the intangibles lost when a newspaper goes away? The stories that came across my mom’s desk were more about the weekly weaving of the ties that bind a community together. Stories about the pros and cons of the new high school redesign, the column seeking volunteers for the pancake breakfast at Library Park, and news of the comings and goings of folks in the neighboring communities of Hillrose and Antelope Springs.
Such stories provide the connective tissue that makes a city into a community; such stories let readers walk in other people’s shoes, creating invisible bonds and cultural empathy. The better community members know each other, the more they listen to each other. It’s not a coincidence that the public square has become a polarized and dysfunctional while many newspapers have been shrinking or disappearing. Newspapers moderate the public debate in a better and more productive way than social media does, bringing people together rather than pushing them apart. Newspapers were the hearth the whole city gathered around. When the social ties that newspapers foster disintegrate, something vital rots away. We become islands unto ourselves, less tolerant of our neighbors. Our connection to each other collapses. Alden Media, the hedge-fund owner that shut the Brush paper down, isn’t tied to the community in any way like my parents and grandparents were. Alden could give a crap about the community. Alden has already gutted the Denver Post and most other newspapers it owns, only interested in sucking what profit it can out of their dying news carcasses while they cut them back to next to nothing. Vulture Capitalism is the epithet they’ve earned.
And yet, it doesn’t have to go Alden’s way. Gary Shapiro over at our news partners, 9News, just did an excellent documentary on all the unique and creative ways newspapers are making a comeback. Shapiro looked at some recent success stories in small towns in rural Colorado, including the comeback of the Pikes Peak Bulletin in Manitou Springs, the Florence Reporter run out of a bakery in southern Colorado, and the linotype-printed Saguache Crescent. They are finding grants, benefactors, collaboratives and even public money to help them keep their papers afloat. But Alden wasn’t looking for creative solutions that might serve the community in Brush. It was looking to cut some pretty meager costs. They also just shuttered the Lamar Ledger, which reaches more than 3,000 homes in Prowers County, and the Burlington Record in Kit Carson County, about two hours north.
My parents and grandparents were the exact opposite of Alden, deeply involved in their community, bringing people together, giving the voiceless a megaphone to shout their hometown pride. They made people’s lives better. They changed laws. They shined a light on problems and got them fixed. They convened and curated a 50-year-long conversation of Brush’s citizens with themselves.
And now, after 14 voluble decades, Brush, Colorado – the high, wide, lonesome Land of the Beetdiggers — is as quiet as a tomb.