Try searching the McDonald’s website for the restaurant closest to zip code 69152, and you’ll receive an apology: no restaurants in that area. Try the same search for a Walmart, and you’ll receive a similar message.
Zip code 69152 belongs to Mullen, Nebraska, a village of roughly 465 residents tucked into Hooker County, population 698. Located in the western part of the state in the Nebraska Sandhills, the closest McDonald’s and Walmart are a three-hour roundtrip away.
And yet, Mullen is home to a miraculous feat in the world of local news: The Hooker County Tribune, the area’s only formal source of local news, has more subscribers than there are people who live in the county. With a print distribution of 757 and 74 digital subscribers, the paper’s market penetration is astounding, especially in an age when rural communities in particular are seeing their local news sources disappear at an alarming rate.
To understand the success of the Hooker County Tribune, one doesn’t need to spend much time talking to its owner, publisher, reporter and do-it-all saleswoman, Gerri Peterson. Speaking with her even briefly reveals a boundless enthusiasm for her community. If she wasn’t running the local paper, she’d probably be a pretty popular mayor.
On the cusp of her 40th birthday, Peterson’s story has received quite a bit of attention in recent months. This summer, the Local Journalist Index report compiled by Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News highlighted her paper’s unusual success. Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki even made mention of the achievement on her MSNBC show.
But when Peterson said she was first confronted with this fact, that her paper has more subscribers than people in the county, her response was: “Yeah, so?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it before,” she said in an interview.
When she was in college at Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska, just northwest of Lincoln, her dream job was to own a small-town paper. By the time she turned 22, that dream had already become a reality.
Peterson had written for her hometown Hooker County Tribune growing up in middle school and high school, and she’d even talked to the owners about her interest in buying the paper when they were ready to retire. She figured that might come five, 10 years after graduating from college. The call came much sooner.
For 17 years now, Peterson’s run the weekly newspaper as its only full-time employee. Juggling those days rushing to meet deadline while having two young kids presents its obstacles for sure, but it’s hard to sense any regret in her decision to achieve her dream.
Surely, said rural news expert and University of Kansas journalism professor Teri Finneman, there are many lessons to be learned from Peterson’s success.
“I think it’s really exceptional,” she said. “She is really doing a phenomenal job and everything that you should be doing.”
Finneman, who wrote the book, “Reviving Rural News: Transforming the Business Model of Community Journalism in the US and Beyond,” validated how Peterson has succeeded in a situation in which so many have struggled.
In her book, Finneman found that people across North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas were often unaware of who the local reporters were in their community. But, she said, there was also a correlation between people who knew their local journalist and those who were willing to financially support local news.
Peterson shines as Exhibit A for how to do things right.
“The fact that she has devoted so much time to connecting with her community, just going out and walking around and developing those personal connections,” Finneman said, “that is absolutely critical to having a successful newspaper right now.”
Finding a niche
Perhaps one of Peterson’s keys to success stems from her focus on providing as much good coverage of her community as she possibly can.
“I am just pretty much covering Hooker County, Mullen. I don’t run a ton of statewide news. I hardly run any national news,” she said. “I really make it a point that, my niche is Mullen and Hooker County. My news isn’t going to be something that they’ve already seen or heard a lot of other places.”
There’s no local TV or radio station in Mullen, so if you’re looking for the official documentation of what’s happening in town, the Hooker County Tribune is all there is. So, what’s inside the 10-by-10-inch tabloid size, 12-page paper? Sports, announcements, local government minutes and lots of photos.
If she had more time, Peterson said, she wishes she could cover the local government and schools more in-depth. Still, whatever’s happening in Hooker County, Peterson aims to highlight in the paper.
“I love to run birth announcements, engagement announcements, wedding announcements, all of those life events that happen,” she said. “I run obituaries, all that stuff for free; I don’t charge for any of that because I feel like if it’s not in the newspaper, that’s a huge part of your community’s history that you’re not recording.”
The next great piece of investigative watchdog journalism likely won’t come from the Hooker County Tribune — Peterson doesn’t have the bandwidth, after all. But that’s not necessarily a problem. Every story in the local newspaper doesn’t need to emulate Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting on the Watergate scandal led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.
“Now does that mean that journalism should give up covering meetings? No,” added Finneman. “But one of the things that I see too often in weekly newspapers is that they are just head-to-toe government meetings. They will write like 30 stories from the county commission, and a lot of people just find that super boring. So there is a disconnect from this watchdog role that we’ve been told since Watergate should be the emphasis of journalism versus what people want out of journalism today.”
In fact, a recent study published by “Press Forward,” a national philanthropic campaign supporting local news, suggests that framing local news as a key pillar in our democracy proves ineffective.
“Ninety-three percent of people believe reliable local news is necessary for democracy, yet many of these same people react negatively to explicit ‘democracy’ messaging,” the report says. “This happens because of a disconnect between cognitive and emotional responses. People intellectually understand the connection but emotionally resist being told about it. Years of political messaging have created fatigue around the word ‘democracy,’ and it now triggers partisan defenses regardless of people’s actual beliefs.”
Peterson would likely also argue that those birth and wedding announcements are just as vital to the fabric of her community and keeping people informed and engaged as anything else she publishes.
“Things are so tense and depressive right now that I think what people really are desperate for from their local newspaper is a sense of connection to some good news right now,” Finneman added.
More than a newspaper
Like any newspaper publisher, Peterson’s encountered her fair share of challenges in recent years.
It used to cost her less than $200 to mail each week’s paper through the U.S. Postal Service; now, it’s more than $300.
She also used to print her paper at a press in North Platte, where Lee Enterprises owns the North Platte Telegraph, a little over an hour away from Mullen. But when Lee closed the press, Peterson had to shift her printing further south in Nebraska to McCook, more than two hours away from Mullen.
Now, she shares a storage unit in North Platte with the publisher of a nearby paper, and they split the cost of a driver who delivers the papers there from McCook.
It’s an inconvenience for sure, but it’ll take a lot more than a printing press closing to stop Peterson, who’s also built her business on a more diversified revenue stream than other local papers.
While subscriptions and advertising are a piece to the puzzle, they’re not the only ways she keeps the Tribune afloat. When she first bought the paper, she continued in the former owners’ footsteps, printing funeral folders for the funeral home in town. When the funeral home was bought and they decided to do more in-house printing, Peterson pivoted to doing all sorts of printing jobs. She designs and prints graduation announcements, Christmas cards and even shipping labels.
And when the variety store in town closed, she stocked up on poster board, envelopes and other office supplies that she now sells as well.
“She is also thinking about value-added work,” Finneman said. “It’s not just the newspaper that she’s doing, but she’s also filled this gap of other things that the community needs that really tie in with the skillset that a reporter has.”
That personal touch is Peterson’s clear differentiator.
“I know there are some newspapers who are kind of covering the community from a different community, especially in the news desert areas,” Peterson said. “I feel like that’s just really hard to properly cover your community if you’re not present and walking downtown to get your mail in that community.”
