First, I want the paper to be really, really good. Best it can be, best there is, anywhere.
By best, I mean the most accurate and relevant reflection of local life in all its ups and downs, glory and shame. I mean brief and broad, and I mean wise and deep.
I also mean the mantra I adopted for The Park Record coming in: “Strengthen community.” We do our part to strengthen community. That’s from a distillation of conversations with the new owners, Matthew and Tatiana Prince, and not mine alone.
This is no mere truism, either. Community papers generally are community minded, but that’s almost never the sole focus. Some newsrooms, the most pathetic, are first about trying to win awards, for instance. Other papers are only about the business and OK if there’s a little space left over for journalism; I left a paper like that soon after vultures bought it. In Aspen, it was all about restoring a fallen newsroom to dominance, and demonstrating the paper had not lost its journalistic nerve. During Covid everywhere, it was hang on!
“Strengthen community” is simple and pure, perfect for my own monkish devotion to this art and craft.
How do we do this through journalism? As editor, that’s where I’m focused. Bearing witness, offering perspective, finding what’s wrong, sharing what’s right. At best we’re a reflecting pond of life here, a repository for ideas, where readers commiserate or object, investigative, a daily chronicle, that first page of history, sounding board, and sure, defender of democracy as the Fourth Estate through observation — all through the careful practice of journalism.
Journalism as practiced today is about as fragmented as fingerprints, everyone’s digit or discipline unique beyond the shape of a hand, say. Fox News is not NPR, which is not NBC, which is not The New York Times, which is not The Deseret News, which is not The Park Record, which also is not The Aspen Times or KPCW or Town Lift.
But we all employ a form of the scientific method to follow evidence we can confirm though sources we deem legitimate and ideally primary vs. someone told someone who told you. The aim is accuracy and strict truth, but another fact is even The New York Times and ProPublica stray. The political press is always colored some hue, and so a reader is best reading across the ideological spectrum, not to mention reading widely anyway.
Local news organizations tend to run closer to the sacred aspiration if more clumsily, speaking from my own experience, typically more serious about quality of sourcing if not so sensational as the others. We take the discipline itself more seriously than most, more focused on getting it right than being interesting. Though our work should be interesting, too. At least butter those peas if you can.
In any case, credibility at the community level trumps compelling reading or viewing. That’s not the case with all our brethren.
Community might be easier to define in the context of The Park Record. There are two basic kinds: a community of geography, and a community of common interest. Inside of each are subsets or cliques of varying sizes.
The primary overlap of geography and interest here is implied in the term ski town. So it is that our interest is the physical footprint of the Park City area as well as the sometimes more metaphysical reality of skiing and everything to do with that.
I think of a pond where a rock is thrown, a duck lands, in a previous life where beavers broke the surface of our pond along Eby Creek outside Eagle, Colorado. The biggest waves are closest to the source and ripple ever fainter outward.
We’re only just beginning, but this is how I think about applying our overlay of coverage of our communities: Where are we strong now? What shows the best opportunity to strengthen? Where might we be overextended? And so on.
In a sense we burned the ships behind us when I landed here. This is a local paper, and so we dropped The Associated Press entirely, that easy go-to for fill if you run out of stories before you run out of pages to fill. It helps that we reconnected with The Salt Lake Tribune and can extend our regional reach, but the main thing with so much here to cover is to figure out how to best go get it.
That’s the most daunting part, though: I see so many stories ripe as plums right here. Small, big, inspiring, damning, all compelling. Which to pick? There are so many. This is an easy metaphor since last fall my family and I counted nearly 5,000 ripe apples off one heritage tree in the yard, bags and bags and bags. Too many to consume or give away in time.
Park City and the ski culture and business here are just like that for me. Fruitful beyond measure.
So this is where that mantra helps begin to distinguish. “Strengthen community” is a variation of “Do the right thing,” only more specific. So it serves as north star as we navigate a future much different than before, with decisions between best choices and focused a little more on hitting the mark than making budget, though even for editors the business necessities always loom.
Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at[email protected]or (970) 376-0745.