Stop the presses: Wyoming press corps suffers historic blow

Since 1904, The Pinedale Roundup has broken a lot of news in the western Wyoming community. But on Wednesday morning, the Roundup published what stands to be the paper’s last scoop: the publication’s immediate closure.

Managing Editor Cali O’Hare posted the “final piece of news” on the paper’s Facebook page, shortly after being instructed to cancel The Pinedale Roundup’s Aug. 7 edition, which was on the verge of being printed.

“Our hearts are broken for our colleagues and our communities,” O’Hare wrote.

The Roundup was among a couple dozen newspapers across five states that were abruptly shuttered on Wednesday, as its Illinois-based parent company, News Media Corporation, announced it was ceasing operations. Eight Wyoming newspapers and a Nebraska-based publication that operated under the corporation’s Wyoming Newspapers Inc. subsidiary were among those closed, resulting in the layoffs of their 30 employees.

The corporation had owned its Wyoming publications — which also included the Uinta County Herald in Evanston, the Torrington Telegram, the Platte County Record-Times in Wheatland, the Kemmerer Gazette, the Lusk Herald and the Bridger Valley Pioneer — for decades.

In a memo to staffers Wednesday, News Media Corporation CEO J.J. Tompkins said the company had explored “every possible avenue” to continue operating, but “reached a point where continuing business is no longer feasible.”

Tompkins specifically cited “financial challenges, a significant economic downturn impacting our industry, revenue losses and increasing expenses,” plus the recent collapse of a plan to sell the company to the Alabama-based Carpenter Media Group.

But the immediate shuttering still came as a “shock” to Rob Mortimore, the president of Wyoming Newspapers Inc. He described his employees as “some of the greatest and hard working individuals I’ve ever met” and said the papers’ closures would leave a void in their communities.

Mortimore couldn’t speak to the company’s publications outside the state. But after cutting newsrooms and personnel in recent years, he said the Wyoming papers were making money.

“Without a doubt, they’re profitable,” Mortimore said, and he’s holding out hope that someone will purchase the publications.

“It’s a great opportunity for someone to come in and take these … and continue to give our communities the news that they deserve and need,” he said.

In the meantime, eight communities and tens of thousands of Wyoming residents are without publications that they’ve relied on for a century or more.

Gov. Mark Gordon called the abrupt closure of the papers “devastating, both to the residents of these Wyoming communities and to the employees whose hard work ensured they were well-informed on local issues.”

“The loss of these publications — which covered local government, schools and their sports teams, and community events — leaves a void that will not be easy to replace,” Gordon said in a statement.

A series of cutbacks

O’Hare first saw signs of trouble in 2023, when News Media Corporation moved to have The Roundup absorb the Sublette Examiner. What followed was a series of cuts that effectively left her as a one-woman newspaper, even as subscribers increased and advertising revenue solidified, O’Hare said.

After the two papers combined in July 2023, people still called trying to place ads in the Sublette Examiner.

“I think our community has really shown how much they care about the newspaper and us as reporters,” O’Hare said. 

O’Hare and community members lobbied hard to keep Sublette Examiner and Pinedale Roundup reporter Joy Ufford on staff and succeeded for about six months, O’Hare said. When news broke that Ufford had been laid off in February 2024, “within an hour I had a gentleman in here who offered to pay for her salary,” O’Hare said.

“They know we need a newspaper of record here, or some legitimate news source,” she said.

The eight papers most recently reported having 10,460 paid subscribers to their print or digital offerings, according to a WyoFile calculation. While significantly down from historical figures, that’s roughly 31% higher than 2024’s circulation numbers.

On Wednesday morning, O’Hare was running around the office, packing up as quickly as possible, including boxing up plaques of awards won by the Roundup and preparing to return trophies to the Wyoming Press Association. She’d come down with a fever Friday and was just starting to feel better. 

“I was already sick so it’s a fun time to lose my health insurance,” said O’Hare, who earned an annual wage of $38,000 and described having to get permission for expenses like purchasing toilet paper.

‘Nobody saw it coming’

At the Uinta County Herald in Evanston, Sports Editor Don Cogger also recalled a series of cuts. When he started with the paper in 2019, Cogger covered Evanston sports, but as staff dwindled, he was asked to add in Lyman, Mountain View and Kemmerer coverage to his beat for publication in sister papers.

When the doors shut on Wednesday, The Kemmerer Gazette was solely staffed by an office manager, Cogger said, while the Bridger Valley Pioneer effectively had no staff; its editor was let go in the spring.

The Evanston newspaper’s advertising manager, Brian Liechty, was tasked with notifying staff and shutting down the corporation’s offices in the southwestern part of the state. Liechty had been with the Herald for nearly 27 years.

“People are just stunned, you know,” Cogger said Wednesday. “Nobody saw it coming.”

The Herald, the Pioneer and the Gazette were all printed in Torrington. As a side gig, Cogger helped shuttle the copies to Uinta County. He wound up picking up the final editions of the three papers in Rock Springs on Tuesday, ahead of their Wednesday delivery to readers. The papers contained no news of their closures. 

“We all deserved better than this, and we wish we could have said a proper goodbye,” O’Hare wrote on The Pinedale Roundup’s Facebook page and the paper’s website.

Cogger wished that the corporation had at least allowed some time for its staffers to wrap up their work. He had to scrap interviews he had lined up for upcoming stories and texted coaches to say he wouldn’t be covering their upcoming fall seasons.

More prominent sports like football, basketball and volleyball get broader coverage, including from the local radio station, but many of the other sports “just rely primarily on the newspaper to get any kind of coverage,” Cogger said. “So they’re gonna lose all that.”

Even among those who might not have had the best opinion of the Herald, “I think they’ll eventually miss it as well,” Cogger said. “I think people don’t understand how much they’re gonna miss it once it’s gone.”

‘Still a great business to be in’

In his letter to employees, News Media Corporation CEO Tompkins alluded to company debt.

“We will make all reasonable efforts to pay you all remaining compensation you have earned as soon as possible,” he wrote, “to the extent permitted by the company’s secured lenders.”

Tompkins didn’t respond by deadline to an email asking in part why the company closed so abruptly and whether the company was still open to a sale.

John Cribb of the newspaper and publication brokerage Cribb & Associates in Helena, Montana, said small community newspapers “are still a great business to be in.” 

They can be built into very successful local businesses, Cribb said, but “it’s harder and harder to find the individuals that really have the skill set, the time, and a little bit of money to make it work.”

In general, he said it’s been a “buyer’s market” for papers since the Great Recession of 2007-2008. 

Unlike past decades, when newspaper mergers and acquisitions waxed and waned in seven-year cycles, “there’s been no catalyst to kind of flip it back to being a seller’s market,” Cribb said. “Revenue continues to go down, and there’s no incentive for buyers.”

He added that shuttering a publication — as News Media Corporation did Wednesday — poses another challenge.

“If they cease publication, it makes it really, really hard to start it back up,” Cribb said, adding, “what do you do with your advertisers? What do you do with all of your subscribers?”

Sorting that out, “can get really messy very, very quickly,” he said. 

The shuttered papers served as official papers of record for local governments, which are mandated by state law to publish things like their meeting minutes, election proclamations and salaries in local newspapers. Those “legal notices” are intended to keep the public informed and serve as a significant source of revenue for Wyoming papers. 

The sudden shuttering of News Media Corporation’s publications presents not only a challenge for local governments, but in the wider view, “a big problem for the rest of the newspapers in the state when it comes to the state Legislature and what to do with legal advertising,” Cribb said.

Wyoming lawmakers have periodically discussed the idea of scrapping or phasing out the state’s papers’ de facto monopoly on publishing legal notices. So far, those efforts have stalled out.

The end of the line

In a Wednesday statement, leaders of the newspaper industry’s trade group, the Wyoming Press Association, described themselves as “disheartened” by the papers’ sudden closures.

“The loss of these newspapers is already shocking loyal readers and advertisers, and the impacts of these closures will undoubtedly have a ripple effect,” the association’s board of directors wrote, with impacts already felt by “tens of thousands of Wyomingites, and dozens of loyal employees.”

The press association added that News Media Corporation’s actions “are not indicative of the state of newspapers in Wyoming.”

“There are still dozens of newspapers who are fierce advocates for their communities, whether through reporting on local high school sports or holding their local governments accountable,” the statement said.

The Lusk Herald was the longest-running publication in Wyoming, established four years before the territory’s statehood, in 1886. The Torrington Telegram, meanwhile, is ending a 122-year run. The closure of such long-running publications “is heartbreaking,” said Mortimore, the publisher of the company’s Wyoming publications.

“We become, you know, part of the community, and people rely on us and count on us, and they’re accustomed to us being there,” he said. “So it’s going to be very hard to take in and comprehend what it means for those people in our community.”

Throughout the day, Mortimore heard from readers and advertisers, who shared messages that were, overwhelmingly, positive. In some ways, he said, that made it all the harder to swallow. A native and current resident of Torrington, Mortimore said he’d gotten choked up reading some of the well wishes from people he knows.

Torrington’s Little League baseball team is currently representing Wyoming at the Mountain Region tournament in San Bernardino, California, and the Telegram has been covering their success.

“It’s been a very good week here, as far as being able to share the stories of what they’re doing, and the community really getting behind it,” said Mortimore, who previously coached the youth, “and now we just … there’s nothing.”

He predicted that, in the absence of the Telegram, the community would continue to share those stories in other ways. But it won’t be the same.

Radio stations offer coverage in some of the impacted communities, like Wheatland and Torrington, but not places like Lusk and Guernsey, Mortimore said.

“There is really no other option,” he said, adding, “It was basically the newspapers in these communities. So that’s the hardest pill to swallow.”

‘We rely on our local paper’

Lynette Saucedo of Torrington described the closures as devastating not only for her community but the entire state.

“In these small, rural communities, we rely on our local paper,” Saucedo said. “There’s definitely a population in our community that, that is their news.”

One of the Torrington Telegram’s final stories was about “Pickles the Rock Snake,” a new community art project that Saucedo helped coordinate in her role as the director of an afterschool program. The artwork was installed outside the Torrington Police Department, and was aimed at forging positive relationships between officers and local youth, the Telegram reported.

Over the years, Saucedo said she and the police department have also used the paper to share information about the warning signs for suicide and to remind youth about staying safe at events like homecoming and prom.

In the absence of the Telegram, that sharing is “going to be difficult,” she said. “We do have social media platforms, but that’s not the same thing.”

Without reporters building relationships in the community and telling local stories, “you just start to lose that community connection,” she said.

Saucedo, 58, has lived in Torrington her entire life and “the Telegram has never not been here,” she said, adding, “not having it is going to be quite a loss.”

Tennessee Watson contributed reporting.

This article has been updated to correct the number of reported paid subscribers across the eight papers and length of News Media Corporation’s ownership. — Ed.