Prairie Sage
Jeremiah Ariaz, Aug. 2023
The Western Star has served its community of Coldwater, Kansas (population 672), since 1884, and is credited as the first newspaper in Comanche county. In advance of the paper’s first issue, a column in The Columbus Advocate welcomed the Star, “Long may she live and shine to illuminate the entire county, so as to enable home-seekers in the far west to find their way through the dark and desolate country.”
Comanche County, 790 square miles in the central High Plains region, is a semi-arid landscape in southwest Kansas where the prevailing wind blows with little obstruction. Prairie sage (Artemisia ludoviciana), native to this landscape, grows in abundance. The tall, hearty plant has thin, silvery-white hairs on the leaves, a lower stem that becomes stiff and woody with age, and a yellow flower that blooms through the heat of summer.
Passing through Coldwater, I spotted the hand-painted sign for The Western Star above the office door. I stopped my car, curious to see what I might find inside. There, I met Dennies Andersen, editor and publisher. He seemed to me a vision of a newspaper man, a “bearded sage” as colleagues sometimes call him.
This visit began a three-year extended paper route during which time I crisscrossed Kansas to photograph offices in every community that still has a newspaper: 135 in total.
There was the oldest paper in the state, The Leavenworth Times, the oldest weekly, The Kansas Chief (both in their 165th year when I visited). There were newspapers with multiple generations of family ownership including, The Iola Register, The Manhattan Mercury, Cowley Courier Traveler, among others. There were many one-person operations: The Prairie Post, The Onaga Herald, The Signal Enterprise, and more, that seemed to operate as much out of a sense of duty as profit. I photographed progressive and conservative newspapers. Long-standing publications and recent entries. Small towns and smaller. Locally-owned papers and those bought by corporations with headquarters beyond the Kansas border.
I found a rich record of individual communities and national concerns inside these utilitarian spaces. With layers of history visible in every corner – from meticulous archives to fingerprints on walls left in ink – some are like a museum of media technology. I found stat cameras with their folded bellows, analogue darkrooms (long abandoned), alongside state-of-the-art digital presses and reporters with active twitter feeds. I found the physical traces of this threatened industry, but also a deeper story of my home state. The press – the “fourth estate”– is closely tied to the identity of Kansas, whose statehood was founded on the ideal that all men should be free, thereby tipping the union’s balance between slave and free states, and ultimately leading to the Civil War. Abolitionists recognized the power of the press and helped it to flourish across Kansas. Today, these proud annals of local journalism are evidence of the state’s historic investment in the role of the small-town newspaper as a truly (essential) civic institution.
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On the wood-paneled wall near the Star’s entrance hangs a clipping with a headline that reads: “The Star still shines: Town Saves local newspaper” with a striking photograph of Dennies, thick dark hair and beard, standing on the main street of town. That was 1980.
Dennies’s beard is longer now, and white. He has been at the helm of the 139-year-old publication for forty-three years. He hasn’t missed an issue, he’s proud to tell me, even though in the spring of 2022 he had a heart attack and was rushed 139 miles to the hospital in Wichita. It wasn’t clear when Dennies would be able to return to the helm, if at all. Colleagues in the region, Susan Edmonston, editor of The Protection Press, and Cindy Vierthaler of The Spearville News,whose operation also printed The Western Star, stepped up to help publish the week’s paper. In addition to helping Dennies in the moment, they wanted to ensure he would have the chance to continue the paper at all. The matter was urgent – the US Post Office only allows weekly newspapers to miss two editions in a calendar year to maintain a second-class permit.
That week’s paper was completed and released on time. One of the articles was headlined “It Ain’t Pretty, But it Reads Well.” The following week, after open heart surgery and a quadruple bypass, Dennies wrote an article of appreciation in which he said, “It was pretty … damned pretty in fact.” His colleagues had come together and in Dennies’s words, “viola, a Star was born.”
I expected to find competition between neighboring newspapers, but I only heard, time and time again, such stories of camaraderie and the feeling that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. The health of one newspaper relies on the health of its peers.
Not long after the rescue, Dennies was informed that the Spearville News (est. 1899) and its print shop would close permanently at the end of 2022 – leaving him in search of a new source to print his paper, and with one fewer ship on the sea.
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Dennies works most days alone in the office. Though he is occasionally assisted by others, The Western Star is essentially a one-person operation. He spends most of his time at a desk with an avalanche of papers and a perpetually overflowing ashtray. At his feet is a waste bin that brims over with green and white Pyramid Menthol Light cigarette packs. The walls are painted colors typical of the 1960’s. Above the desk, a cross constructed of painted blue clothespins hangs beside a headline about a 92-year-old businessman who found oil and natural gas under Comanche county. A pull-quote from the story reads, “Why the hell don’t you retire? You’re 92 years old.’ I tell them I have a bad habit; I like to eat.”
Each time I stopped in Coldwater, I found Dennies working, the office door open. He was polite to my presence, unconcerned with me lurking about with my camera for hours at a time. He might tell me stories about things I directed my lens towards, but mostly he just continued his work and let me do mine.
On my second visit, Dennies was on his computer laying out the next issue of the Star. Legible on his screen was the headline, “Back in the Older Days”. Stories from the Star’s archives are selected to reprint for the column, a popular section of many small-town newspapers I visited.
The Western Star office is like a time machine that takes me back, before Craigslist, Facebook and Google – the giants of tech that were among the dominos that fell, disrupting the funding structure of the entire newspaper industry. In the early 2000’s the introduction of Craigslist led to a crash in classified advertising. Shortly thereafter, Facebook and Google both began building their companies off the free content of newspapers while absorbing their advertising revenue. Online shopping crippled locally-owned businesses that once bought ad space.
“The internet has been a mixed blessing here at The Star. As a plus, it gives me access to “fact-checking” far beyond that available by telephone and face-to-face queries,” Dennies tells me. “It is also a source of story ideas and information that was previously unavailable, or at least difficult to get. A big down-side is the competition for advertising dollars. That I could feel soon after most of the town was hooked up on the internet. Another downside was the availability of goods and services online. It hurt many of my customers’ businesses, as well as my own.”
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As I drove across Kansas, I often arrived at newspaper offices that had recently been shuttered: the Chase County Leader News, the Haskell County Monitor-Chief, The Jetmore Republican, all with the signs still hanging on the offices. Others, including the Dodge City Globe, The Newton Kansan, and the Emporia Gazette, had recently relocated from their historic locations – often the multi-storied cornerstones of Main Street – into modest offices, sometimes tucked away in strip malls or other unassuming, less-accessible, corners of their communities.
The repeated experience of arriving to discover a vacant office, or one downsized to a shell of its former self, informed the photographs I made and ignited a sense of urgency as I worked to document these spaces. I can’t count the number of times I heard some version of, “do you think we’re going extinct?” upon asking permission to photograph and explaining the project to staff members. Dark humor aside – the anxiety was real, for them and for me. Some folks earnestly encouraged me to hurry, to finish the project while there were still offices to visit.
In large and midsize Kansas towns such as Hutchinson and Topeka, newspapers are owned by GateHouse Media, a privately held company that owns a disproportionate number of newspapers across the country. Though the papers are still publishing, I was unable to reach someone in their offices after repeated attempts. When I visited, their doors were locked, closed to the public. Another midsize Kansas town, Olathe, no longer has a print newspaper at all.
This is in part what makes operations like The Western Star stand out. Dotted across much of the prairie, nearly every 20 to 30 miles, is a local newspaper that perseveres.
In their reams of paper, I see the bonds of a town – the printed pages offer a mirror to the community, and form the bedrock to our collective freedom, locally and nationally. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”
We live in a time of increasing political division, minimal attention-spans, and “alternative facts” – it is no accident that this coincides with the precipitous gutting of community news. In 2019, a PEN America study concluded: “as local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked. With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office”. This fear was echoed in nearly every conversation I had with newspaper men and women. Informed by what I heard and saw, the work has become an ode and an elegy.
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Evidence of the past haunts the humble concrete building of the Star, a persistent presence that informs an equally dogged hope for the future. In the old darkroom, I find a pile of photographic negatives: pictures of a community captured in silver, latent and long abandoned. (Dennies tells me the last negative he printed was of a high school basketball game, a young player going in for a shot, 18 years ago.) I can hear the intrepid strokes of a keyboard from the darkroom; they pause as Dennies greets someone walking in off the street. In Coldwater, the office doors remain open to the public. The Western Star still shines.