This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Colville's newspaper, The Statesman Examiner, has, in the last year or so, changed ownership. Murrow Fellow Monica Carrillo-Casas talks with publisher Gabriel Cruden about how that has changed the way the newspaper does business.
Cruden is not only owner and publisher of The Statesman Examiner, he also operates the Sun Advertiser; the Deer Park Tribune, another weekly newspaper; and the Huckleberry Press, a regional community newspaper distributed to the 12 counties of eastern Washington and north Idaho on a monthly basis. He also owns The North Columbia Monthly, distributed from Spokane to Canada, across Ferry, Stephens, and Pend Oreille counties.
Gabriel Cruden: My only real rule for writers is that they can't tell people how to think and they can't tell them how it is, because the goal is to really build on a sense of neighborliness that no matter what your perspective and opinions on things, that we're all neighbors here. If your neighbor's stuck in a snowbank, you're going to help them out. So it's really building on that concept and encouraging opportunities for people that may have differing viewpoints to be curious about their neighbor's viewpoint and sharing in those stories and having it all be tied to our geographic region that we share.
Monica Carrillo-Casas: Tell me a little bit more about how long you've been at the Statesman Examiner.
GC: May 1st was the one-year anniversary of taking over The Statesman Examiner and The Deer Park Tribune and The Sun. Previously, they were in corporate ownership for a number of years, and as is borne out by nationwide research, the small-town publications that are corporate-owned are going belly-up across the nation.
However, those that are locally owned and family-owned, they're seeing a resurgence, and even though we're in this digital age and there is such an opportunity for different ways to access information and news from any number of sources, that small-town local news reporting remains incredibly viable and important, particularly as the readership and the demographics within those rural areas tends to be on the older end of things. Basically, in those small-town areas, it's a news desert unless there is a community newspaper.
Knowing all that and having worked at The Statesman Examiner fresh out of high school, running the darkroom back in the late '90s, and being very involved in my community here, and having people ask me, is there any way you can take over the Statesman and bring it back? I finally found a way to do that. The way I did it was that I formed the Inland Northwest Media Group. That is an entity that hires the staff that then provides the professional services to all of the publications, because it's a really tough go for any one publication to try and make it in rural America. The funding aspect of things is such a challenge, and so having several publications all being served by that same media group collectively, I was able to hire some staff to be able to do the work, and so that's how we got started a year ago. Since then, it's just taken off.
We've got such overwhelmingly positive response from the community. So many people are so happy to have their newspaper back. We've been growing it steadily over the last year and working on getting our internal house in order with all our systems, and then really striving to re-establish the trust of the community that we're going to be providing quality, high-quality journalism.
MCC: You said you were at the paper fresh out of high school. What differences or pursuing a story look like now versus back then?
GC: The mediums by which we gain information has changed. At that time, we had very limited resources as far as computer technology and the internet, so it was much more a paper-based, in-person-based, phone-call-based type of experience.
I started in the darkroom and then eventually became a reporter and photographer. My last year there was in 2004, and 20 years later, I stepped back into it. Much of all of what I did before is actually the same.
It's all about relationships, it's all about showing up and being consistent in your delivery and being as unbiased as you can and being curious and asking the questions and sharing the stories within the community in as fair and balanced way as possible. We beat the drum of having it be relevant, have it be timely, and have it be geographically tied. There are so many opportunities to get distracted and pulled in different ways, but those three things really hone our focus into what it is that we include in the publication each week and it's something that readers have hugely appreciated from all walks of life and perspectives.
MCC: Why is a local newspaper important to rural communities?
GC: There are so many sources for news and information, but most of it is not dialed into that specific local are. A lot of people may largely get their local information from places like Facebook and that's not being disseminated according to journalism standards. So that's one of the big differences,and one of the big values that the local paper can provide. Then, along with that, in rural America, people are very involved in community activities, such as sports, and their local theater and different things like that. We provide really thorough coverage of those things. You can see that on Facebook, for example, but to be in the newspaper, it still holds a certain cachet. It's like, oh, I was in the newspaper, and it's something you can clip out and you can put on the fridge or you can send to the relatives or put in the scrapbook. There's an intrinsic value there that people still deeply appreciate.
People are proud of their community, and the newspaper is their tangible, visible representation of that community, because it's the venue where a community is telling itself its own stories and the newspaper is becoming the historical record for that community. You'll find in these small communities these little museums and historical centers, and so what's recorded in the newspaper is an important part of that preservation of a community's history.
MCC: Have you noticed a shift in trust toward your paper over time?
GC: By and large, it's been the exact opposite. I get emails, I get letters, I get people stopping me in the grocery store, out on the street. I was just at a ribbon cutting, and immediately afterwards, people come up and say thank you so much for bringing back our newspaper. Finally we've got a newspaper you can read, and so that's been the experience. It's a difficult path to walk, to regain that trust, particularly in today's atmosphere that's pretty politically charged. Differences of opinion are not always expressed in civil ways.
One of our goals is that you should never be able to tell what our opinions are on things, who we vote for, any of that sort of thing. That has no place in that newspaper.
MCC: What are ways that you have tried to bring in readers and new subscribers for the paper?
GC: We've done subscription specials as a way to help promote our readership. We've started showing up, like we're everywhere, so if there's anything going on in community, we've got somebody there. Everybody knows everybody in community and word gets around pretty quick that way.
We also have been developing some internship programs. We currently have four high school interns, two from Colville, one from Kettle Falls, and one from Northport. That's been fantastic, getting to work with them. We also had an intern over the winter, a college student who grew up in Colville and went away to college in Prague, in the Czech Republic. She came over an extended Christmas break and spent a couple months with us, working at the newspaper, and is going to be graduating this year and talking about coming back and working for us. So it's that sort of organic process of just really growing within community, you know, building a reputation, and like I said earlier, being consistently showing up.