On the wall in my office in downtown Kalispell hangs an oversized print of the first Flathead Beacon ever published. There are two stories on the cover written by former staff writers Myers Reece and Dan Testa, one on a proposed Canadian mine that threatened the North Fork watershed and another on the fast-changing local job market.
The date reads May 23, 2007. I was a 27-year-old editor-in-chief at the time, part of a company with just five employees who were at once ambitious and optimistic about the future of this brand-new weekly newspaper. Then, within months, the country would enter the worst economic downtown in a generation. The housing market tanked, longtime businesses closed, and unemployment rolls swelled.
Like everyone else in the valley, we feared for our jobs, especially working at a startup in an industry that wasn’t exactly on sure footing. Those first few years were a slog and much of our reporting focused on the fallout from the Great Recession. It was, at times, bleak, but we were lucky to have the support of our owners, Maury Povich and Connie Chung.
Once the economy began improving, the company quickly expanded by adding a quarterly magazine and marketing department. And, despite our daily online presence, the print circulation grew into nearly every corner of the region – from Ronan to Eureka and all the towns in between. Our largest papers were upwards of 80 pages and rarely below 64, making deadline days especially long.
It was a quintessential labor of love. We would sprint to get the paper to the printer on time each week, often sending pages with just minutes to spare. And no matter which employee (past or present) was there making final edits deep into the evening, only then would we take a collective breath. Then, we would do it all over again the next week.
I’ll miss the grind. I’ve worked in this industry long enough to know that each day you send a newspaper or magazine to the printer is a small miracle – one that was likely preceded by anxiety-induced nightmares. I’ll have fewer of those now as we transition the Beacon to an online-only product, although we’ll still have enough print products, such as Flathead Living magazine and Glacier Journal, to occasionally keep me up at night.
COVID lockdowns and the increasing costs of printing and shipping may have accelerated this transition of the Beacon to digital only. And perhaps we could have continued producing the weekly newspaper for a few more years. But to me, that would have just further delayed making hard decisions instead of rethinking what we can be right now.
We’re still a media company, but we are now refocusing our resources online, offering more news stories faster than we ever have before. We’ll have more time to produce audio, provide staff recommendations and tell stories in new ways.
But I’ll still miss the grind. And I’ll always appreciate those coworkers who spent long hours on Mondays putting the finishing touches on well over 800 Flathead Beacons. They built the foundation of this company and you become closer with your peers when you create something tangible together for the general public to consume and critique.
I was lucky to grow up with this newspaper and the dozens of people who helped create a small miracle every week. Now, on to the next chapter.