Small-town New Mexico newspaper rewrites its obituary
Small-town New Mexico newspaper rewrites its obituary
The Deming Headlight’s office shares a downtown block with a barber, a hearing aid supplier and quinceañera dress shop in the small New Mexico town of Deming. In the wee hours of a recent Friday morning, Nick Seibel was there to drop off 1,000 copies of the twice-weekly paper.
“The cover story is about a Deming girl who is in a national competition, the ‘Cake Boss’ competition,” Seibel said as he flipped through the pages. “She’s been an entrepreneur, running her own baking business since she was 6 years old.”
Also filling the Friday edition were stories about a holiday charity drive, an ethics complaint against a local politician and recent happenings in high school sports, plus ads for a pediatric office, the local grocery store and a couple of real estate agents.
“It’s a very beautiful paper. And I’m not just saying that because I’m the one that designed this issue,” Seibel said.
He was also filling in for the delivery guy, who was out sick that morning. The Headlight is printed in Sierra Vista, Arizona, and trucked to a midway point where Seibel picked the papers up. Before 4 a.m., he had driven over 200 miles.
“Stuff like this happens a lot,” Seibel said. “And I often think, ‘Man, it would be amazing if I could just be a publisher.’”
In October 2022, Seibel bought the Deming Headlight for “not very much money” (he said that $60,000 in loans, mostly from friends and family, more than covered the purchase) from Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain. He’s been running it alongside another southern New Mexico paper, the Silver City Daily Press, which he has owned for about a decade.
“I thought going in, you know, ‘I did this with the Daily Press. Like, I know what I’m getting into,’” Seibel said. “I did not know what I was getting into.”
The Silver City Daily Press, which Seibel purchased from another local owner in 2014, came with a strong subscriber base and a pool of steady advertising customers. Under Gannett, the Deming Headlight had become what Seibel called a ghost paper, with no physical newsroom in town and just one local reporter covering the 15,000 residents. By the time Seibel purchased the paper, that single staffer had been laid off.
“I’ve always said that newspapers are a habit. It’s part of your day, part of the rhythm of your life. It’s absolutely a truth of the business,” Seibel said.
But when Deming residents noticed local reporting start to disappear from the Headlight, many of them removed the paper from their routines.
“So our challenge is, how do you get people to give you another chance once they’ve written you off?” Seibel said.
Linda Cooper was one longtime subscriber who stopped valuing the Headlight when its pages were filled with national wire copy and stories from Gannett’s nearby big-city paper, the Las Cruces Sun-News.
“It didn’t matter to me. I was probably on the verge of becoming a nonsubscriber when it sold,” she said.
Under local ownership, Cooper noticed improvement and saw the news staff grow to two reporters and an editor. She wanted to show her support but hadn’t received a bill since the change in ownership. So Cooper stopped by the downtown office to pay up.
“They said, ‘We need somebody [to manage subscriptions].’ I said, ‘I ran a bank for 40 years, I can answer a phone.’ So that’s what I did,” Cooper said.
She came out of retirement to work customer service for the Headlight.
“It’s mostly a word-of-mouth kind of thing. I ask people, ‘Have you read it lately? No? OK, read it. It’s changed,’” she said.
But the paper’s general manager, Debbie Troyer, said subscription sales are just part of the revenue picture.
“We’re trying to bring back the advertisers that were lost with Gannett,” she said.
Troyer worked as a sales executive in California’s Silicon Valley before moving to Deming. She uses those skills to convince local businesses that in a place like Deming, print is not dead.
“We have a lot of seniors, you know. They like to hold the paper. And we happen to live in a county where a lot of people don’t have internet coverage,” Troyer said, so online marketing reaches only so far.
Here’s the other part of her ad sales pitch: She tells local business owners that this town, situated just 30 miles north of the U.S. border with Mexico, needs a local news source.
“We’re a border town. Things happen down here. If you have a friend that’s a Democrat and you’re a Republican, you know that you’re both getting polar opposite information on Facebook,” Troyer said. She sees the Headlight as a badly needed, accountable referee. “If you want the truth, you need to support the paper.”
This past September, as the Headlight was closing in on one year under local ownership, publisher Nick Seibel said subscription and ad sales were growing, but the paper was still losing money every month.
“I thought, ‘The people who’ve supported us, the people of Deming, need to at least know. Otherwise, they’re just gonna wake up one morning, the paper’s not going to show up, and that’s not a fair thing to do to anyone,” Seibel said.
So, he wrote a column warning that the Headlight was going under.
“There was a big outpouring of support,” Seibel said.
Local businesses stepped up to buy ads, including some long-term contracts, and the Headlight has started hitting its break-even ad sales number every week. A flood of new subscribers brought the paper’s base circulation from 250 to 400.
“And anytime you can say you’re growing subscriptions at a newspaper in 2023, that’s a good thing to be able to say,” Seibel said, adding that revenue isn’t where it needs to be, but it’s moving toward sustainability.
Earlier this year, Gannett, the Headlight’s former corporate owner, signaled that it is likely to sell or shutter more small newspapers around the country and focus on larger, big-city dailies. But Seibel believes small, rural towns may be the last places where there is a market for community newspapers.
“There are so many voices in those larger markets. TV, radio stations, independent websites,” Seibel said. “And sure, there’s more money, there’s more business potential. But in small communities, people really identify with their newspaper. And that’s really the key to making this work.”
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