Newspapers across the country are closing, not growing. That makes The Park Record a stubborn green weed in a landscape where actual journalism has been paved over and “news” has devolved into electrified gossip, hot blacktop. Yes, I do have an attitude toward the meth on our devices that has proven to erode the mental health of so-called adults as well as children, while metastasizing the infamous echo chambers that led to Myanmar’s catastrophe in 2017 and the putrefaction of democracy in today’s America. I wish I were exaggerating. We’re the frogs in the kettle, which is obvious only if you are not participating, and literally everyone is being boiled. We no longer bother with eating our peas, getting nutrition from our information diet, given our craving. This is carefully curated, by the way, this hormone teased out, then that. Which makes our turn at The Park Record more remarkable. ——— For me, it began with a Google sheet. That is, a shared spreadsheet everyone in the newsroom could access and contribute to. This became our budget, or plan for each page of the print edition, the key gathering point on production day. No more mysterious editor in an office, an opaque or black box means of editing that came down to no one else really knowing what was going where. I’m vague because no one could really tell me how it had been done. I’m probably also exaggerating because it did get done and a print edition did appear just fine every Wednesday and Saturday, as always. I’ve had various means of budgeting my papers over the decades, white board with erasable markers in the newsroom over the copy desk, shared email, a file in the software system. I tweaked a Google sheet template from Aspen, my previous stop. Color coding that others have since customized allows everyone to keep track of our progress from rounds of editing the stories through pages ready to send to the printer. This is the best means yet for the purpose. It’s also a key metaphor for the collective effort it takes to do this work right. Because it’s so visible and changeable, to various degrees we’re all responsible and can see plainly where to contribute without needing instruction. Exactly the model for the newsroom we’re trying to build. My other foundational contribution was burning the boats behind me when I landed here in 2023. That is, we stopped using a wire service for national and international stories. Reliable filler, in other words, for local papers that can’t fill their pages on their own with stories readers can easily find just about everywhere else.  This meant the local paper really had to be local. Best get busy. I did cheat, a little. We have an agreement for access to Salt Lake Tribune stories, as well as for some other ski town papers where I used to work, and non-profit entities like High Country News that allow reprints of their work. We use these sparingly and for stories relevant to the Wasatch Back. I wanted the structure to frame our mission and set up the staff with a system that runs on collaboration, initiative and focus on local coverage. One that does not require one person to run things, no kings. Indeed, one that frees everyone to develop mastery for a higher shared purpose, if you want to get philosophical about this. As I do, absolutely. ——— Newspapers are folding across America, especially in the rural parts of the country, and other local news entities are in similar straits, although some online-only ventures have found niches in the metropolitan areas. We’ve been the anomaly that matches the news staff to the mission. We also made the print paper and online edition free to the consumer. We added The Wasatch Record edition, starting with a separate page one for Wasatch County readers, and we’ll see how it goes from there. I’m hoping to add separate sports and Scene for the edition as well, in time, if there’s support for that. Paid subscriptions are down, as expected, even as we lowered the price to the cost of mailing. But the number of copies we print is increasing, online metrics are growing, and more people than ever are turning to us as I’ll declare a healthier part of their news and views consumption. Sales are starting to increase, too, and not at the incremental gain local news entities would call great in these times, but more toward tech expectations. This is a good sign, since we’ve barely gotten started here. I am decidedly not a sales guy, but I will say the opportunity is through the roof for anyone game enough to take it on. We are looking for strong sales talent. ——— If I were adept at sales and were selling, I’d stop right here. But I’m not and I’m not. The truth is we have a long, tenuous ways to go in this era beset with AI enhancements to the best but also the worst of human nature, an apt description for the uses of fentanyl, actually. To be that stubborn green weed, that oasis in the widening news desert, we face not only the conditions underlying this, largely corrosion as well as disruption from Big Tech, but our own nascent growing pains. Here’s an example that ultimately gives me hope: Going free to the consumer means we need to be everywhere. Growing delivery points comes with the heightened chance we’ll miss some. Here’s one, a fast-food restaurant that took the paper for customers and went overlooked sometime during the Sundance Film Festival. The restaurant manager simply picked up papers from another location on his way in to work to stock up his place, but never let us know. We noted papers at the location and assumed they’d been delivered. So we didn’t realize he wasn’t getting his papers delivered, and we also figured the rack where he was picking up copies was more active. The win here is he saw the value in having papers in the restaurant to the point he was making sure they were there. Our error is we didn’t realize this for nearly two months, and frankly we should have. We have plenty of work to do, and lots of flaws to fix, in every department and every facet of what we do. Most certainly including me. Hah, which is why that Google sheet is my metaphor, and Tom Sawyer my hero. Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745. The post Journalism Matters: Making gains together in our mission impossible appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less