New Year’s will mark two years of tumult I wouldn’t trade.
With 2022 came the sale of the company I’d grown up in for 22 years. This was my first time on that side of a sale, which is much, much different than being with the acquiring company, welcoming the acquired, who surely will get used to doing things our way, with our systems and software, all the burden of adjustment on them.
That was The Park Record in 2015, joining our Swift Communications family. I already knew Nan and Andy, and had met Jay and Scott during a reporting trip when the town of Vail leaders met with Park City and town of Truckee folks about common issues.
Mostly what I remember from the trip was a magical 6-inch overnight snowstorm and my wife saying, OK, we’ll leave at noon then. Go, snowboard your heart out — until noon, no later. So I had a morning of bluebird perfection, harbinger of how I’d find moving here a decade later.
But for COVID, I’m not sure my company would have been sold. Everything changed during the pandemic itself, of course. Bustling offices went silent as we all went home and learned to work from there. We managed differently, worked differently, though we had a familiar foundation, acting maybe even more like a family through that period.
I kept my job in the first sale, starting Jan. 1, 2022 with a new company. To my surprise, my new minders did pretty much what I would have done with staffing and managing the business in Grass Valley, Truckee and South Lake Tahoe as we came off COVID relief and back to regular business. My new GM had just the right experience to teach me a ton about paid circulation, a big hole in my knowledge to that point, and so a welcome learning opportunity.
It was plain we were being prepared for a second sale, though, and so it was that June the Grass Valley operation sold again, this time to a classic vulture. I was dead publisher walking for the first few weeks while no one answered my calls and the designated ax recovered from a bout of COVID before summoning me. I had only known being promoted in my career, so being relieved of my position was downright surreal. Maybe a great revelatory experience, but no fun at all. Like looking into an abyss.
But they offered to plug me in as editor, and that was fine, even at half the pay. It had been 14 years since I last had that role, and there would be plenty to learn and relearn, which mainly was a lot of fun. My bigger problem was I thought the new owners and management were idiots. That’s not a great attitude to carry, though I’ve seen nothing since to change that assessment.
Actually, dropping my position made sense. I probably would make the same decision. Stripping the paper of news resources, among other functions, was less forgivable, and not very smart businesswise, either. You could see it plainly just down the road with their other paper in Marysville, a shell of what it once was. Headed fast to zombie.
Meantime, The Aspen Times was blowing up in a different way. The aftershocks from a defamation lawsuit had emptied the existing newsroom and eroded community trust in the paper, one of two seven-day-a-week dailies in that town. What a mess, and what a perfect next challenge for me. The bottom line was they wanted to restock a viable newsroom and compete with the other daily in town.
I loved it, all of it. I worked seven days a week for a year, mainly hard deadline days with the last page due out the door at 11 p.m. I met a whole new slew of interesting people, resumed friendships with others, had an entirely different challenge than ever before. And hey, it was Aspen. I lived downtown in a tiny studio, ran trails, took the epic ski season off my snowboard but did get in lots of uphilling and Nordic skiing, good for my balky knee.
The mission at the nub was to prove The Times had not lost its nerve, and so it was a bit nervy to show some bite in our coverage, but also essential. I wasn’t going to preside over a lapdog, not if we were to retake our place as straightforward truth teller about life in one of America’s apex communities.
Then Tatiana Prince called. What she and Matthew want to do is even more compelling. The Aspen Times was about trying to put Humpty Dumpty back to together again, rising from ashes, and by the time of the phone call, that job was mainly done, I thought. The problems had become more the regular problems with dinky dailies in these times, always tippy canoes. The Park Record bears more promise.
We moved something like this early in my career, seven papers between upstate New York and southern California in a decade. It’s a common progression for a certain kind of itinerant journalist, and maybe the best way to learn America, covering one town after another.
So déjà vu, a return to a way of life we once knew well until landing in Vail, and staying there long enough to raise the kids. I confess I hope for something of the same magic in Park City, and growing with the paper.
Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.