For over 125 years, Moab has had a record, a newspaper documenting it all: Livestock markets, the uranium boom, the uranium bust, high school sports wins, death notices, public officials, scandals, triumphs, the real live history of Moab, written down by The Times-Independent.
And this summer, this weekly newspaper serving southeastern Utah for generations made some history of its own.
They became a nonprofit under the umbrella of The Salt Lake Tribune.
Zane Taylor has served as publisher of The Times-Independent for years.
He's also its pressman.
Every single Wednesday, he prints the paper from the back room of the TI's Center Street offices.
Taylor has literally done things like setting plates and checking color registration hundreds of times over two and a half decades, but he still encounters new things.
“Some odd thing happened in the folder yesterday that I'd never seen. You know, and there's ghosts in this building too,” he said.
“I'm working on appeasing the spirits that haven't left the room.”
Ghosts are relevant here, because a lot of people, many of them Taylor's own family members, have spent a great deal of time in this building in Moab's downtown.
Spilling, sometimes literally, their own blood, sweat, and tears to make this place hum.
Taylor, like his father before him, and his father before him, has been getting the paper out now for generations.
And Taylor has been worried, not about the press itself.
“Oh, it's great. It'll run all day long for 100 years,” he said.
But he wasn't so sure about the paper running for the next 100 years.
Taylor has watched revenue streams dwindle as the cost of production rises.
And he says no one in the family's next generation wanted to take on these mounting challenges.
He couldn't see a pathway forward to keep The Times-Independent independent until recently.
“I had a feeling that something that was unpredictable would happen. I'd have been quite certain that something other would happen,” said Taylor.
Maybe something bad, something volatile. This donation of The Times-Independent to The Salt Lake Tribune? Also unpredictable. But to Taylor, it’s something good.
“Looking down the gut of something very different for a long time, this is a very happy story. This is an exciting new path for the newspaper,” he said.
It's a path more and more media outlets are choosing, to become a nonprofit.
And now there are even a few examples of what's happening right here in Moab, a nonprofit media outlet acquiring a for-profit under their 501(c)(3) umbrella.
Last year, the parent nonprofit of public radio station WBEZ acquired The Chicago Sun-Times.
And just this week, the largest newspaper group in Maine is now a nonprofit under a Colorado-based media organization.
Although The Salt Lake Tribune will handle advertising and circulation and administration, Sophia Fisher, a reporter at The Times-Independent and editor Doug McMurdo will retain editorial control.
Both of them seem cautiously optimistic about these changes.
“I've never known an optimistic side to the industry until I learned about the new nonprofit model a couple of years ago,” said Fisher.
“And I think we have seen more and more newspapers move to that model across the country, which is really exciting. I think it's not without its challenges, and it's important to take the step very seriously. But I'm certainly thrilled,” said Fisher.
“What we do is important,” said editor McMurdo.
“So however we deliver information, as long as that continues effectively, and people keep edifying themselves with that information, then I'll feel okay,” he said.
It's not a guarantee of success when a news organization turns from for-profit to nonprofit.
Any nonprofit still needs to figure out how to bring in diverse revenue to become sustainable.
But that's a problem more news outlets are willing to take on.
A lot of them are in a tough position, one that The Salt Lake Tribune faced in the mid-2010s.
That's when the Tribune was operating at a loss.
They had severely reduced their staff and scaled back on their local reporting.
Like The Times-Independent, they saw nonprofit status as a way forward.
One that would recognize local news as a public good and open the pathway to receive donations and grants.
“And when we received that paper from the IRS that said we were a nonprofit, we were the first of our kind to make that transition,” said Lauren Gustus, Executive Editor of The Salt Lake Tribune.
She says when they got that status, Tribune staff began fulfilling their mission to lift up journalism in Utah.
They started the Utah News Collaborative where other news outlets could share stories and they started asking Utah's news organizations what they needed.
Taylor here in Moab responded.
“And Zane (Taylor) said, ‘if we don't do something,’ this is in response to a survey, ‘a lot of the independent news in Utah is at risk.’ Right? And so We followed up and that's where the conversation started,” said Gustus.
At a recent open house at The Times-Independent, Gustus explained to a packed room of Moab locals what this transition for their oldest newspaper will look like.
The Tribune will make The Times-Independent free online, and the print edition will also be sent at no charge to anyone with an 84532 zip code.
This will give the paper a much wider reach, attractive to advertisers.
And they can now take donations.
“I think we approach things differently in that we are owned by the community. We are vested in the community's success,” said Gustus.
The Tribune literally wrote a playbook for news organizations considering this transition to nonprofit status.
“I hope that it's a model here in Utah, right? There are still many communities that don't have the relatively robust offering that Moab does when you look at radio, newspapers, you know, you've got some sources here that counties that are significantly larger than you don't,” said Gustus.
News deserts might continue to be a problem, even in this new world of nonprofit news.
Some argue that the philanthropic model only works when there's wealth in a community, and it could still leave poorer areas out.
But in Utah, even wealthier counties have news gaps.
“Davis County, home to the Speaker of the House, the President of the Senate, the Great Salt Lake, and a school district that's being investigated by the federal government for racism, right? There's no daily source of local news in Davis County,” said Gustus.
“I've never felt more mission and purpose than in Utah. Because there is so little local journalism and because the power dynamics here are such that there's so much opportunity to uncover stories that need to be told," she said.
Back at the press, it's all smiles from Taylor.
His family's era at The Times-Independent could have ended differently, something that he is acutely aware of.
Farewell messages might have been bitter instead of bittersweet.
He calls this new opportunity great news for Moab.
“This is really, really good,” he said.
Taylor will serve on The Times Independent's new advisory board, but he'll hang up his ink and rollers as its pressman.
He only has a few more weeks with these machines, the paper will soon be printed in northern Utah, and Moab's local press will go idle.
I ask him if he'll miss it, running the press.
“No, I'll have it in my dreams, I'm sure,” he laughed.
And by then, he may even be on vacation, for the first time in decades, on a Wednesday.
This story was shared with KSUT via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including KSUT.
Copyright 2023 Aspen Public Radio.
