From the Publisher’s Desk: Vernon did it right

Before acquiring three newspapers this year in Nevada, I looked at opportunities to expand to several communities as a small-town news publisher. What I found probably won’t surprise you: newspapers struggling to make ends meet and owners trying to pull a dollar value out of their life’s work as they searched for buyers.  

Owning these things has not been easy over the last 20 years. As one rural development organization shared, around 2,500 U.S. newspapers disappeared between 2005 and 2022. Recently, papers have closed at a rate of two per week.

That’s what makes Vernon Robison’s tenure as the publisher of the Mesa Valleys Progress so remarkable. Headquartered in Logandale, Nevada, and serving both the Moapa and Virgin Valleys, the Progress was established by his uncle in 1987.  After taking over in 2004, Vernon successfully navigated the industry’s choppy waters, serving the community with excellent local news coverage while keeping the business in the black. 

“I always have said the newspaper business is really at least three businesses,” Vernon said in a recent interview on my Rural Business podcast. 

Those three businesses include generating high-quality, local content that an audience can’t find elsewhere, having solid distribution throughout the community and maintaining a sustainable revenue stream. For a newspaper to thrive, you have to have all three and, with sheer determination, Vernon made sure the Progress always did. 

It started with a huge learning curve when Vernon took over.

“It feels like those first few months were a few years,” he said.

At that time, the paper was assembled through the old “paste-up” method, where images and copy were arranged on a board to create a printed page before it was reproduced. Within months, Vernon fully moved the layout process to digital and the Progress started printing in full color.

The publisher-slash-writer-slash-editor-slash-manager-of-everything navigated economic upheavals, including the 2008 market crash (one of the only times he had to take out debt to keep the paper running) and the 2020 pandemic when the economy briefly went into freefall. He oversaw the establishment of the Progress website, which is now one of the largest traffic sites in the Mesa Valleys, and he led the charge of expanding the paper, which originally just served Moapa Valley, into the Virgin Valley, which he said took a lot of heavy lifting early on but “turned out to be a very successful thing, and it sort of feels natural.”

Vernon is modest when asked how he pulled all this off, and I’m sure there are thousands of stories he could tell, probably a few for each weekly issue he put out over the last 20 years. If my math is right, that’s about 1,040 issues. He said it took a lot of sweat equity and a willingness to do a little bit of everything. But it’s more than that. It took skill, business-savvy, a deep care for the community and a desire to go the extra mile on its behalf.

And through it all, it took courage to keep current with an industry that was changing at light speed.

“Every week it’s a different product,” Vernon said. “I think that’s probably the main thing, just being able to adapt to the situation, take a look at it and say, ‘Okay, how do we go forward?’”

As the years marched on, Vernon sensed he didn’t want to keep up this pace forever. 

“If there was anything…a decision that had to be made, even the smallest thing, it came back to me, and 20 years of that is exhausting,” he said.

So, Vernon passed the baton to me in July, and now I’m publishing four weekly news publications in rural Nevada – the Lincoln County Record, the Ely Times, the Eureka Sentinel and the Progress – hoping to approach the job the way Vernon did. 

“I believe that local media and local newspapers are tremendously important and essential to charting a vision for the community,” he said. “Not that the newspaper is [charting the actual vision], but it’s reporting it. It’s putting it on the record.”