Well, the office wasn’t hard to find. Just look up. Bold as a headline: “Park Record Building.” I parked.
First days are always bewildering, and humbling. Probably as it should be. Big notions of glory to come collided Monday morning with three brass keys atop a sunlit desk in a stranger’s office, now mine. What are these? I’d have to ask.
I know I’ll have to ask a lot. But at least I’ve done this before, facing the newborn’s awesome task to learn to crawl, to walk, while hardly believing in the possibility of someday sprinting.
Most recent was a year ago in Aspen, following a lawsuit against the paper that in essence emptied a newsroom and precipitated a community’s crisis of confidence in what had been the dominant of two daily papers.
Perfect. Looked like fun. I’d get to be all the king’s men with Humpty Dumpty, summon the phoenix, go like hell. All these visions of white horses, lances, charging at the other paper, tip up, aim true. And then day one arrived: a dark, nearly empty newsroom, software I didn’t know yet, tomorrow’s paper to put out. Get busy, bub.
This quest at the Park Record is not that. Not at all. We’re aiming to unlock what will work best in community journalism in an age when 2,200 newspapers have died in the past dozen or so years, many others have become zombies as investors suck out their last life juice, and nearly all the remaining survivors must run lean, anorexic. Only a few show signs of fresh green growth amid a hillside burned to the quick, hot and black.
Now I get to follow helping preserve daily newspaper competition in the last small town where it still exists by joining an effort to replant the fourth branch of democracy in sterilized soil. For people like me, it doesn’t get more exciting than that.
Park City looks like the perfect laboratory with a well-stocked local NPR station and online-only entity to go with the ol’ reliable paper printing since 1880. I’m partial to the ski towns — here, Aspen, Lake Tahoe, that Voldemort Vail. Besides skiing and outdoor orientation, or because of it, the energy is higher in these places. We’re fitter, perhaps smarter, approach life a little differently.
I think the ski towns also have more fun. Maybe it’s that we know fun includes plenty of pain in the form of a good burn in the thighs and lungs to crest that next big hill, ready access to an adrenaline rush one ski run beyond our current ability.
My company of the time when I took on Truckee said it would be OK to close the shop, add to the mounting toll, as reorganization became necessary, running in the red no longer an option.
That was my hardest day one. I knew how to put out the next edition. Could we keep the paper alive?
We did. With the benefit of time, we learned we could keep it going, even thriving, and so far it has survived the pandemic, somewhat to my happy surprise. To survive, I had to figure out how to be an ad director, far outside my boundaries. It was necessary.
A key, then, is necessity. Big dreams may get you through the front door, key No. 1. But day one strips all that to studs. Funny, how those memories of the past get a little gauzy about this reality — a helpless frustration, budding anxiety, finding yourself set suddenly among new colleagues, these strangers, so confident and knowledgeable, holding another key.
Well, I love it. There’s a paper to put out. I have to trust all will become clearer and clearer. And so faith will unlock this next door.
Three keys on the desk. I asked and we figured this out. No. 1, No. 2 and M. Front door, Park Record office door, and men’s room. Necessity, people, faith. I stopped short of lining these up too closely, instead declaring this a good start.
Don Rogers is the new editor of the Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@parkrecord.comand (970) 376-0745.