EDITOR’S COLUMN – Doing the work

I hibernated from technology this weekend. No phone. No apps. I spent the weekend like it was the “olden days,” which, according to my teenagers, is ye olde 1990s.
I watched Tom Holland — not the actor, a cat spider named by my 10-year-old — in our kitchen window, shedding an exoskeleton, catching several moths and otherwise just hanging out. (Real quick, allow me to point out that Peter Parker is a broke newspaper photographer, so this is all technically on-topic.) I read two and a half books. I also did an ungodly amount of laundry, because in my adult years I have learned a reliable way to ruin my own day is to discover there’s nothing left in my drawer but exceedingly uncomfortable underpants (lookin’ at you, Spanx).
It was glorious.
I am not sure when we collectively fell for the illusion that we have to be permanently on. Always available. Posting, measuring, optimizing, scrolling. I happen to know this game particularly well. In my past marketing career, I’ve grown social media metrics by thousands of percentage points and generated millions of views. Social media is a good tool, even for us newspapers, and metrics can be useful, but they are not the work.
The work happens to be decidedly less Instagrammable. For example, this week I spent my time digging into the Rio Blanco County commissioners’ use of executive sessions — scrubbing through meetings, reading (and rereading) Colorado’s sunshine laws and doing due diligence to determine whether public officials followed the law. (Um, they didn’t.)
I am pretty sure this work is not going to be destined for internet virality. But it’s work that matters, and that work takes time.
Unfortunately, this creates a big issue for newspapers in an attention economy that rewards fast, bright, brazen and immediate, measured by hazy metrics and an algorithm no one understands.
Good reporting — at least the kind I want us to produce — requires the opposite. Slow down. Read the document. Listen to the meeting. Send the email. Make the phone call. Check the statute. Check it again.
And that work, unlike a haphazard 10-second viral video of someone falling down stairs, is not free to produce.
In 2023, when the Herald Times was two weeks from ceasing publication, readers and community members donated $40,000. That was extraordinary, and it told us something important: People care.
That support is part of why we are still here. I don’t want to wait until we are two weeks from disaster again and then sound the alarm. We have known for a long time our current business model is not sustainable. Advertisers are cutting spending for something not necessarily more valuable, but “shinier.” Someone apparently convinced them that competing with cat videos is reasonable, which is clearly wrong. The cats are gonna win, you guys. They always do.
In addition to that challenge, costs keep climbing. We are paying roughly 125% more than last year to mail copies, among other increases. The basic economics of producing a weekly newspaper keep getting harder.
The Herald’s future continues to be uncertain because we have not yet figured out how to sustainably pay for the work we do.
Rest assured, I have been wrestling incessantly with this issue. Lately, that’s translated into waking up every morning with a ball of anxiety in my chest, scratching out desperate dreams in various notebooks, looking for a perfect, bright and shiny answer everyone will love instantly. A revenue knight in shining armor, if you will.
Unfortunately, I don’t have one yet.
What I do have is a desire to do the work — to hold our politicians accountable, honor lost loved ones and tell our stories slowly, carefully and well.
I believe that work has value. Clearly, our community does, too.
It also has a cost.
I think, perhaps, that I am a little jealous of Tom Holland the cat spider. It doesn’t need to pay a printing bill or gasp at a postage bill. It’s not concerned with trending audio, social media metrics or who said what on a message board. Nature knows not everything worthwhile has to be done faster or louder. 
All it has to do is the calm, careful, inexorable work it was made to do.
I don’t have a perfect answer to the revenue riddle yet. We are just going to keep doing the work.