Making a newspaper like the Newport Miner is nothing like making The New York Times. The Miner is a community newspaper that, like The Times, serves as a watchdog over local governments. But it also writes about county fairs, high school sports and the other things that make the Newport/Priest River area a good place to live.
Michelle Nedved has been The Miner’s publisher and part owner for 22 years. She talks with SPR rural affairs reporter and Murrow Fellow Monica Carrillo-Casas.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Nedved: I believe when I started here, we had four people in the newsroom and a proofreader, and two or three people in the front office, three ad reps. Now we've got one ad salesperson who does a bang-up job. And our newsroom, just in the last couple years, has gone through quite the transformation.
With COVID, we got down to two reporters and then no graphic designer. We lost the graphic designer position, which hasn't been filled. And I don't think it will be filled. The newsroom, we were down to Don Groening as my editor. And he was our newsroom for a couple years.
We had a really difficult time filling a position that was vacated. But now, we were able to fill that position with Gabrielle Feliciano. She's a brand-new graduate from Washington State University. And we also have a WSU fellow, Sophia Aldous. And she actually came back to us. She quit to go into the medical field, I think it was a couple years ago. Then with that position, we were able to entice her back. So that was great.
MN: I think that people look to the newspaper now for different things than they did when I started, mostly because of the internet.
Things like breaking news, sports scores, people can get online immediately.
What we're trying to focus on now is more storytelling, longer form, kind of more feature stories, even as far as covering city council meetings. It used to be you go to the council meeting Monday night. Tuesday morning, you write a story. The city council did this, this, and this. What we're trying to do now is find the deeper story and talk to more people and talk more about how what municipalities are doing affects people's daily lives rather than just actions that the city council took.
Same with sports. We still do the follow the games, report the scores and the stats, but we're always looking for feature stories on players that might not always show up in the stats. My favorite example is last year, our softball team at Newport. I don't think they won a single game, but they had two sisters who were pitcher and catcher. And so we did a front page sports feature on the two of them. And so it's just a different perspective.
I think that the biggest change in the last 20 years is kind of refocusing on what people expect from their newspaper in light of what the Internet can give them.
Monica Carrillo-Casas: You said your newsroom has gone through a transformation over the last couple of years, especially with COVID. What did reporting look like during the pandemic?
MN: It got pretty contentious up here. We're a very Republican county and we're right on the border. I mean, the Idaho border's two blocks away. And so Idaho mandates were very different than Washington mandates. You could kind of tell people's politics by where they chose to grocery shop. Because in Washington, you had to wear a mask to go to the grocery store. In Idaho, you didn't. And we've got two major grocery stores about three blocks away from each other.
Our staff shrunk. We had one person start working from home. Most of us stayed in the office, though we just socially distanced. But there was the perception that we would report from the medical community's perspective and the Department of Health and what they were recommending. And there was, I wouldn't say backlash, but people took that to mean that we are a liberal newspaper, which we're not. We're a community newspaper. We don't lean one way or the other. We just report the facts. We really tried to cover both sides of the debate. Like we had one business owner who had a, I can't remember what he called it, but he had like an outdoor barbecue when we weren't supposed to be gathering. And we went and covered that. We talked to people and wrote a front page story about why people were feeling this way. And so we really did try and get both sides of the story while still being responsible for public health.
MCC: During your time at the Miner, have you noticed a shift in trust toward your paper during the pandemic, or have you seen it shift over time?
MN: People are always, have always been suspicious of reporters and I don't think that that has changed very much. And it hasn't, the polarization that COVID caused in regards to our reporting hasn't, I don't believe that it spilled over into anything else. It was just our COVID reporting, if that makes sense. They still trust us to tell them what city council did. They still trust us to, you know, report on the Easter egg hunt or the county road department. They still, readers still trust us to be accurate there. It was just that COVID component, I feel, that put a kink in things.
I don't think it's something to overcome. You just do what you believe to be ethically correct.
MCC: You talked a little bit earlier about having to refocus what's being reported on. How has social media and technology affected revenues and how you pursue a story?
MN: It's decimated our classifieds. We've lost a revenue stream as all newspapers have. People don't sell stuff in the classifieds anymore. They do still advertise yard sales, I'll say that.
As far as the news gathering or competing with social media versus the newsroom, we actually use it as a tool. I mean, there's a lot of information out there that people are willing to give up. Not, that does not mean that we take what we see on Facebook and put it in the newspaper. But it gives us leads as to who to talk to, who believes this way, you know, who supports this. And then kind of silly stuff; if we want to do a picture page on our Facebook page, we just ask for, send us pets of your photo or photos of your pets, and we will get 30, 40 pictures in a couple hours. So yeah, there are benefits to it.
If there's a prominent rumor out there that's all over social media, we pride ourselves on being able to set the record straight. We had a situation just this week where a principal and pre-server was put on administrative leave, or I shouldn't say he was put on leave. He was investigated for an incident. Rumors were rampant on Facebook. And we actually talked to him, talked to the superintendent, and it wasn't nearly as nefarious as everybody believed it to be. And that's the front page story today.
MCC: What are ways that you have tried to bring in readers and new subscribers for the paper?
MN: I think right during COVID, we actually had a jump in subscribers, which subscriptions have been dwindling for everybody for, you know, decades. But we did see a bump there. And now we're pretty steady now.
We need to be more proactive, which we're actually starting a subscription drive this week where we're sending free copies of the newspaper to everybody on certain mail routes. Because there's a lot of people out there who don't think about the newspaper anymore. And we believe if they got it in their hands, they would see how beneficial it is and how entertaining it is and interesting it is. And if we give it to them for four weeks, they're going to want that fifth week. And that's when they'll call and subscribe. And we've had good luck with subscription drives in the past. We don't do them as often as we should. So that's going to be a concerted effort here.
MCC: Where do you see The Newport Miner in the next five years?
MN: I think we're going to continue to grow. I actually see a bright future. There was a big dip in revenue during COVID, which is understandable. And since it's been quote-unquote "over," we've been steadily climbing out. And this year is shaping up to be a really great year.
We've made some improvements in technology. We're branching out into digital advertising, which I think that community newspapers especially have really resisted. But you have to meet people where they're at. And if we can hook them on the internet and then bring them to print, that's the ultimate goal. But I think that we're finally joining the 21st century. And I only see good things happening here.
MCC: Is there anything else you'd like to add that I didn't ask you?
MN: I really appreciate Washington state's support of the fellowship program. I think that that has been a big boon to community journalism. I know that there's been concerns among other publishers that because the wages are so high, it's stealing reporters from other newsrooms. In our case, we were able to bring Sophia back into the fold, which I mean, she's a fantastic writer. And we really missed her when she was gone. I think that that shows that people still value community journalism. And it's necessary for a community to thrive, I think, for there to be somebody keeping watch over government and celebrating the community's successes and mourning community's losses.
I just think it's the coolest job in the world.