Drop in on the right day to the home of the home for authors and you’ll find the handful of staff amid piles and boxes and shelves of books around a repurposed dining table concentrating on their laptops and chatting in the amiable way of people hard at work together.
This is the heart of the Torrey House Press, one in a warren of tiny offices at Church & State near downtown Salt Lake City.
This also reveals the core of the publishing house about as far as you can get from the Big Five of the biz in New York City. Here is a key to understanding an operation filling a big hole in the publishing world, deep and wide as the West.
This family at the dinner table, surrounded by books.
In rural Alaska north of Anchorage, Amy Bushatz is bootstrapping a local online news service, the Mat-Su Sentinel. I learned last week over Zoom that we come to our shared obsession from very different places, though there are intersections.
One super El Nino winter while all the surf breaks were big, big enough to tear down homes and piers, I lived near Santa Cruz between fire seasons, reading the Santa Cruz Sentinel and fantasizing without reason about writing for them someday. I was attending Cabrillo Community College primarily for the fire academy there. I’d only tacked on English 101 to fill in my class schedule.
Amy grew up in the Santa Cruz area and really did work at The Sentinel, in essence a journalist since childhood. A reporter from the paper did a story on her family, and she knew in the gut right then this would be her career. Now she’s breathing life into the last embers of an all-but-dead newspaper she bought recently and tacked on to her online news operation.
The twilight of legacy newspapers, radio and television is stubborn — slow to phase out and even slower to replace. Amy in her isolation runs at the vanguard of this new dawning, sucking in all the knowledge and help she can find virtually.
We at The Park Record are both very similar and a polar opposite. A dying paper attached to a dying company that once ruled like the British Navy was bought at a bargain by a wealthy couple with the intent to revive our version of genuine community service.
Our marching orders were to restore and build the journalism, and worry about revenue later. Never mind that later has arrived, or that this has been my ever-present worry for, oh, decades through tenures at several papers, along with the fast aging that comes with the publisher role.
Amy, the career journalist, knows this well now. At least half her days and nights concern keeping the ship afloat so that she may practice her craft, the one that sews her community together through local news.
You’ve seen the trends in reading, whether local news or books. But then, the masses have never been overly concerned with the essence of either, even through the blooming this past century or so in literacy and public education.
Only a few take advantage of this vein of human knowledge, somehow less compelling than what TikTok, gaming and other mindless amusements deliver — mainly helping eat time until we can pass entirely from this world.
Is there a hard pearl of a market for this minority that would lift itself only with effort out of the competing bliss of ignorance, that haze? This is the seed, after all, for any growth in the intellectual capacity and progress of our species, though that sounds a bit dramatic.
The commercial markets for books and community news have squeezed, spigots shutting off the flow of profit. Companies in it for the money are shedding anything costly — like risk — and consolidating, condensing, closing in droves.
Amy and the Torrey House crew can barely afford to hang in there. Ask about riches or joke about building empires and you’ll get a wry scoff and big eye roll for an answer. This is mission impossible with no hope of payoff, only the chance to keep struggling tomorrow and probably against greater odds. Here are callings they still can’t not answer.
Probably why I love them so.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.