California's oldest weekly finds buyer, will stay open - Entrepreneur Generations

Downieville, Calif. (Wikipedia map)

Today's small, good thing: the oldest weekly in California was about to shutter, but it has a new owner and will stay open, Brittney Mejia reports for the Los Angeles Times. The Mountain Messenger has been published since 1853 in Downieville, pop. 282; its main claim to fame is that Mark Twain wrote for the paper for a few weeks while hiding out from the law.

Editor and publisher Don Russell has been trying to find a buyer for the past year. He wanted to retire by mid-January, but was unable to find a replacement even after running ads locally and with the Newspaper Publishers Association. In the paper's Dec. 12 edition, he put out a final plea for a buyer, Mejia reports.

That's when Carl Butz stepped up. A fourth-generation Californian and Downieville native, Butz and Russell have been friends since Russell moved there in the mid 1990s. Russell tried to warn Butz that the paper would cost too much to save, but "the next day, Butz came in with a check," Mejia reports. "Butz is aiming for a nonprofit model and wants to rely on more volunteers to help fill the paper, which for a long time has fallen on the paper’s two full-time employees, Russell and Jill Tahija."

Butz told Mejia it's important to save local newspapers. "There’s just been this rash of these things across the country; you lose the community," Butz said. "I think we need to have newspapers."

It's worth noting that Butz is pursuing a nonprofit business model. As Mark Glaser notes in a Knight Foundation article, "local news publishers cannot depend on the old ways of doing business." The article offers five nontraditional business models for local newspaper owners to consider.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2Tbo1Hs California's oldest weekly finds buyer, will stay open - Entrepreneur Generations

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