Captain’s Log: Growth Spurt

When I was younger, there were times when I grew so fast that my pants went from touching the floor to up around my calves in what felt like a matter of months. My bones would ache, and my line of sight would adjust slightly higher on the horizon, and my mom would say I was going through a “growth spurt.”

This morning has me pretty quiet. My bones don’t ache, but my sight is adjusting metaphorically, and I’m tearing through all the emotions – humble and excited, nervous and grateful.

We recently had the opportunity to acquire the Winnemucca Publishing properties, including the Great Basin Sun and the Nevada Rancher. 

A few years ago, a guy named Peter Bernhard, a newspaper publisher from Seattle, Pacific Publishing, bought a bunch of Nevada newspapers, including the Nevada Appeal, the Lahontan Valley News, and several others, including the Winnemucca Publishing papers. He later combined the Lovelock Review Miner, the Humboldt Sun, and the Battle Mountain Bugle into one paper – the Great Basin Sun. 

Today I will travel to Winnemucca to meet our new team there. 

Our hope is to bring back the local papers – because we established The Pershing Post last year, we’ll do that old historical thing newspapers have done for years: combine the mastheads somehow. The Pershing Post/Lovelock Review Miner. Not unlike the Lahontan Valley News/Eagle Standard. We will also bring back the Humboldt Sun, so Winnemucca will have its own newspaper, and then we will reestablish the Battle Mountain Bugle, so Lander County has its own paper. 

Against all the odds, this works when the local community believes in what we’re doing, like our Fallon family has. The number of volunteers, cheerleaders, and subscribers has been the backbone of our success over the last seven years. It took a while in Lovelock to catch on, but the past few months have been so gratifying as the local community has embraced the paper and reached out in so many ways to make it work.

We’ve spoken conceptually to people in Winnemucca and Battle Mountain – quite a bit of “what if” –ing, and it feels like from all I’m hearing that we’ll be able to build a little community momentum in each of these places and if the stars align (oh yeah, they did that on the 28th, the planets did anyway) be up and running across Rural Nevada in the next couple of weeks. 

So, while I sit here this morning, again wiping water off this keyboard and trying to figure out how to say, “Keeping you Bugled,” we’ll always be right here…

…Keeping you Posted.

Rach