Local News Struggle in Southern New Mexico: How a Start-up Ended

When Diana Tittle retired to Sierra County in southern New Mexico in 2012 with her husband, she never imagined she would be working eight-hour days, seven days a week without ever taking a paycheck.

And yet that is how Tittle spent the past year working for the Sierra County Sun, an online nonprofit news outlet focused on investigative journalism that holds local government accountable.

Sierra County Sun editor Diana Tittle.

Tittle’s official title was editor, but her duties went far beyond editing to include writing 12,000-word investigative stories, sending out alerts to subscribers, writing grant applications to raise funds and sending thank-you notes to donors.

But even that wasn’t enough to keep the Sierra County Sun running. The local news crisis has cost the United States one-fourth of its local newspapers since 2004. Last December, the Sun became a casualty too.

A note from Tittle on The Sun’s website that announced its closing read, “Sun founder and chief reporter Kathleen Sloan and I have considered it a privilege to serve you, and we’ve enjoyed the work of keeping the community well informed about local government and public affairs. But we have each decided that the time has come to retire from our daily labors.”

The closure was part of a disheartening loss of journalism in southern New Mexico. According to a July 2021 report by the New Mexico Local News Fund that examined the local news ecosystem in the southern part of the state, the newsroom staff of Las Cruces Sun-News, one of the most prominent publications in southern New Mexico, is about one-third the size it was in the early 2000s.

Ruanna Waldrum
Sunset in Truth or Consequences, N.M.

Covering Sierra County

Tittle, a 1973 graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, had a successful career as a magazine journalist and author in Cleveland before moving to Sierra County.

She said she noticed two things immediately after her arrival. First, Sierra County had two newspapers, the Sierra County Sentinel and the Sierra County Herald, offering unusually robust coverage for a county with roughly 10,000 people. Second, a talented reporter for The Herald by the name of Kathleen Sloan was covering local government.

“We were impressed that a community this small had such an excellent investigative reporter,” said Tittle.

Sierra County Sun founder Kathleen Sloan.

When Sloan left Sierra County to work for newspapers in Iowa and Florida, Tittle said, she left a void in accountability reporting.

The Herald shuttered in October 2018, citing a decline in advertising revenue. The family-owned newspaper had gotten its start 90 years earlier, when the county seat in Sierra County was still called Hot Springs. In 1950, the town was rechristened Truth or Consequences after winning a contest to be named after Ralph Edwards’ game show on NBC radio.

The loss of The Herald left Sierra County with only one local news source, the weekly Sentinel. That news outlet’s owner, Frances Luna, has overseen the Sentinel while serving as a county commissioner and a city commissioner at various times in the past. Tittle viewed those multiple roles as a conflict of interest, but Luna disagreed, telling Medill in an email: “We are a small community/county. One cannot simply wear one hat and contribute to our town, to our future, to our kids, to the heartbeat of what makes us a viable place to call home.”

In October 2019, Sloan returned to start a new online news outlet focused on watchdog journalism in Sierra County  — the Sun. Tittle said she was overjoyed.

But it was a one-woman operation, and by July 2020, Tittle said it became clear to Sloan that she was not going to have enough income to keep her from having to tap her retirement fund.

And so together with a number of concerned readers, Tittle launched the “Save The Sun’’ fundraising campaign. They were able to raise enough money for Sloan to continue operations. The Sun took on a new life as a nonprofit news organization, and Tittle joined the staff as editor.

The Sun also found a new member, Deb Nichols, to cover the county beat so Sloan could focus on long-form investigations. Nichols, a scientist who retired to the town of Hillsboro in Sierra County, said she realized the importance of holding government officials to account after the 2016 presidential election.

They made some waves and probably made some enemies, which is what all investigative journalists do when they do good work.

Mark Glaser, innovation consultant, New Mexico Local News Fund

Haruhuani Spruce, a longtime Sierra County resident, credited The Sun as the reason why many residents in Sierra County are much better informed about their local government. She said The Sun also impacted the workings of the government itself.

“I think the group of people who are trying to make a difference in city government has grown considerably since The Sun appeared on the scene,” she said.

But Sierra County, much like the rest of the United States today, is deeply polarized, and The Sun was not without its critics.

According to Christie Conklin, a 42-year-old resident who was raised in Sierra County, “The [Sun’s] articles tend to have all the problems but none of the solutions.”

“They made some waves and probably made some enemies, which is what all investigative journalists do when they do good work,” said Mark Glaser, innovation consultant at the New Mexico Local News Fund.

Financial Sustainability Was Elusive

The Sun received a $12,000 grant from the Local News Fund. Tittle said the grant “engendered a six-month-long conversation and endeavor to figure out how to become financially sustainable,” but ultimately did not result in a solution.

Glaser said The Sun’s financial struggles point to a larger challenge that emerging news organizations have to reckon with.

“The issue with startups is that it’s very easy to start putting content out in the world, it’s a lot harder to figure out the business part of it,” he said.

In an unusual move for a news organization, Sloan said she never considered advertising as a business model for The Sun because it was too big a conflict of interest in a county as small as Sierra County, with limited local businesses.

Tittle said as a very small newsroom they could either focus on the news or sell advertisements, and they chose the former.

Besides, she said, “There are only so many advertising dollars, and [The Sentinel has] a lock on it, so we were never really able — or even interested — in selling advertising,” she said.

The pandemic further cemented this decision. “Trying to sell advertising to businesses that were under lockdown during the pandemic is not an easy thing even if you had a sales staff, which we did not,” said Tittle.

Trying to sell advertising to businesses that were under lockdown during the pandemic is not an easy thing even if you had a sales staff, which we did not.

Diana Tittle, Editor, Sierra County Sun

The Sun relied on donations and subscriptions from a few wealthy families. In 2020, The Sun had total revenue of under $50,000, according to its IRS 990 filing.

Sloan said a key reason that local news outlets struggle in communities with limited resources is that “they can’t generate the income from the rural, low-educated, non-reading public,” said Sloan.

In 2019, Sierra County had a population of 10,791 and median income of $29,755, as compared to the national average of $67,521 in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Sun had a content-sharing arrangement with Searchlight New Mexico, an online news organization focused on investigative and public service journalism. With a statewide focus, Searchlight has fared better than The Sun in terms of fundraising.

But Christian Marquez, operations director at Searchlight, said although they are “financially healthy,” fundraising has been challenging. “Internally, [New Mexico] is a poor state. So it’s hard to raise large amounts of money, especially directly from the community,” he said.

Later this month, the Local News Fund is launching the Southern New Mexico Journalism Collaborative of 10-14 local newsrooms. With support from the Solutions Journalism Network and Con Alma Foundation, Glaser said it’s a step to close the rural-urban news divide in the state.

The Sun announced that it will distribute $10,000 — its remaining assets — to Searchlight.

As a last resort in the face of the closing, The Sun ran a nationwide search to find an operator. Tittle said she spoke to a number of promising candidates, but ultimately came up empty-handed. Unsurprisingly, no one wanted to work for free.

Anandita Bhalerao is a master’s student in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She reported this story as a project in the school’s “Researching the State of Local News” course. This is the third in a series of stories produced by students in that class.

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