CASPER—Oil City Weekly didn’t quite make its deadline today.
The weekly’s sister product, Oil City News, has been a digital-only publication for more than a decade, so the staff is well-versed in churning out news. But posting an article and photos online is a whole different affair than shoehorning that same article along with several other stories, letters to the editor, obituaries, advertisements and a sprawling events calendar into 12 printed pages. And just two weeks into the endeavor, staff was still ironing out the process.
“We’re trying to work from going from online to print, as opposed to print to online,” Shawn Houck, the publisher and owner of Oil City Weekly, said from his Casper office that Wednesday afternoon in July. “So we’re trying to find our process.”
Despite the production manager shipping the file to the Douglas press 30 minutes late, Houck’s team remained on schedule to print and deliver the second edition of Casper’s brand-new newspaper the following day.
The accomplishment marked a small landmark for Houck and the team. One edition is just a newspaper. But with the second edition, he said, “we are now officially a weekly.”
In a media landscape where local news has been rapidly eroding for more than a decade, creating a new print product may raise some eyebrows. Plenty of people warned Houck against what they see as a risky venture, he said.
But the Casper native isn’t new to building things from scratch or experimenting with media iterations. Along with starting several companies, he owns Oil City News, a site in the vein of the hyper-local websites that began proliferating across the internet around 2010.
Creating a print publication isn’t new for him either. Houck launched a zine as a college student in the ‘90s. It was a popular pastime then, a punk rock gesture of free expression.
In a way, Oil City Weekly is punk rock too. It’s a clear step away from the internet that has utterly consumed daily life in 2025. To sit down with a newspaper and read about historic buildings or city council meetings without distractions popping up on screen is to defy the always-online status that has become commonplace.
“I think there’s nothing more punk rock than embracing this format,” Houck said, “and trying to think about it in a way that will work for today’s news environment.”
Readers, he added, are jazzed to see Casper restored to a two-newspaper town.
“They’re saying things like, ‘thanks for bringing the newspaper back,’” he said. “We’re not bringing the newspaper back. We’re just distributing it in a different way.”
Back to the roots of print
Houck is a Casper native, the oldest of six children who grew up in the wind-swept central Wyoming city. He has the wiry build of a marathon runner and the frenetic energy of an ideas guy. His work experience is a blend of advertising, media and upstarts.
While studying English at the University of Wyoming, Houck enrolled in journalism courses. Outside of the classroom, he published a zine, calling it the 630 Chimichanga — named after his dorm room in White Hall. The small tabloid started as a platform for inside jokes shared among his friends.
“It was just things we thought were funny,” he said. But over time, it grew to include CD reviews, feature articles, political commentary and regular contributor content.
He discovered he enjoyed the ad and design side of journalism. After graduating, he started an advertising agency called AdBay and spent many years helming it.
An admitted serial entrepreneur, Houck had other enterprises percolating. He sold ads to movie theaters around the state, co-owned The Casper Cutthroats baseball team and launched Frontier Brewery, which he still co-owns. In 2020, he sold Adbay and launched Upslope Media.
Along the way, he acquired Oil City News in 2016, and now also publishes Cap City News in Cheyenne and County 17 in Gillette. That put him in the thick of the hyper-local digital sites that sprouted up to help cover incremental and breaking news in small towns or even neighborhoods. The trend was seen as an effort to fill news holes as traditional newspapers downsized or shifted more coverage to national syndicated wire reporting. It coincided with a rise in social media and represented a way for people to get their news for free.
And it wasn’t always good for journalism, Houck realizes now.
Longer features and deeper dives faded with the rise of bite-sized news, he said, and daily newspapers took a hit. He also came to realize that digital-first practices like publishing arrest reports only partially tell the story. Oil City News no longer does that.
“So our understanding of what it means to do it right has changed quite a bit in the 10 years that I’ve been involved with the organization,” he said.
Oil City News also strives now not to cherry-pick coverage based on what may be “clickbait,” he said. For example, staff makes an effort to cover every item on the city council agenda, not just the controversial ones.
With a growing team and more sophisticated approach, he said, Oil City has been feeling ready to take another step.
“We’ve been wanting to do a newspaper for many, many years,” he said. “We saw there was a need for it in our community, and we also saw an opportunity to advertise so that we could better support reporters.”
Offline by design
Casper has a rich history of journalism. It’s home to Wyoming’s largest print newspaper, the Casper Star-Tribune, which traces back more than a century. In its heyday, the paper had a bureau in Washington, D.C, and dozens of editorial staffers. It also had a competitor: The Casper Journal, a free weekly.
The Star-Tribune acquired the Journal in 2004 and published it until 2022, when it was discontinued. That left a hole in the local newscape, Houck said: the free, community-focused weekly.
Houck hopes to occupy that role. Oil City Weekly intends to be 100% local — no national or even state news. From the advertising side, he added, it’s a way to expand the offering of Upslope Media.
Wyoming news veterans like Dan Neal are happy to see the new product.
“We need local news, and that’s where Oil City is focused,” said Neal, a Casper journalist who worked at the Star-Tribune from 1981-2004. “Staff at the Star-Tribune is working hard, but, you know, they’re limited, and so I think it’s great that Oil City is going to take reporting that has already been going online, and getting it in a physical format where people could find it around town, in coffee shops and places like that.”
Competition is healthy in journalism, Neal said. It pushes outlets to be better, faster and more accurate.
Creating a new print product in this internet age can be seen as questionable. And some people warned Houck against it. But, he said, Oil City has a deep understanding of social media and digital news, and he thinks starting from that foundation will be advantageous. Plus, he really believes Casper readers will embrace Oil City Weekly.
“It just feels right,” Houck said.
Full circle
Oil City News churns up a lot of content for the website; the staff couldn’t possibly fit it all into the weekly paper, Houck said. To determine what goes into the print product, he said, they will follow two guiding principles.
First, “we know there’s a lot of important news that we’re covering, primarily things like elected boards, city councils, things like that.” But, he said, internet algorithms don’t often push those stories, favoring instead more sensational headlines. So those stories will take priority — stories about school-board decisions, city development, new businesses.
“We want to provide news to the community that we think is important for them to understand and know about,” he said.
The second principle for determining content is a direct response to readers, he said, who consistently ask for event listings. With that in mind, Oil City Weekly has an extensive calendar of events designed to be pulled out for ease of use.
Readers also want physical copies of certain types of stories, Houck said, like obituaries, marriage announcements, business stories. Those, too, will be published in the weekly.
Houck used some of his own marketing savvy for the paper’s debut. In early July, Oil City staff and friends dressed up as newsies and marched in the Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo Parade in Casper, handing out fresh copies of the first edition to readers. It was fun to see the crowd’s response, he said.
Holding the physical paper in his hands, he added, “feels awesome.”
It also reminds him of another time.
“It’s funny, I found my old zine,” he said. “And I put them side by side. And we’re basically doing the same thing I was doing 20-plus years ago. It’s the feature, it’s the events calendar, it’s a little bit of the cheeky attitude. It’s all those things that haven’t really changed much.”
Yes! I’ve read 2 issues and I love having a print newspaper in my hands. I worked at The Trib along with my mom who was Soc editor. I’ve missed the Trib and loved the editorial cartoons and letters to the editor. This fills a void.
Print media and newsprint will never die. But they can and do live like zombies…