Section 1:
Q: Take us through the transition from what
you did as a radio journalist and your
decision and why to start a newspaper.
A: When I was [growing up in] Sioux Falls,
South Dakota, we had three radio stations. I
was just enamored by disc jockeys. Back
then in the early 50s, they were still
important people, and I wanted to be a disc
jockey. I would hang around the radio
stations and ask for an opportunity to work
and ask for an opportunity to work. Well,
finally a station called KIHO invited me to
become the nighttime disc jockey. The only
reason they did that was because of the three
stations in Sioux Falls, they were the fourth-
rated station. There was one from outside of
Sioux Falls that had a better rating than they
did.
And so by putting me on at night there
was nobody listening anyways, so what
difference does it make? In fact they made
me change my name - I was on the air as
"Will Castle." I took my mother's maiden
name and my middle name, that way if
anything happened they could disavow that
they even knew me because Peter Wagner
didn't work there, it was a guy with the
name Will Castle.
By the time I got to be a senior in high
school I had enough credits in high school I
was able to leave school at noon everyday. I
was able to work at a number one radio
station, and eventually that radio went Top
40. I became the Top 40 disc jockey from
4:00 till 7:00 on that station. Not a very
difficult job: "Number 37 this week is."
"Now here's number 32 on the hit parade."
"Moving up from number four to number
one." That's all I had to say. It doesn't take
a lot smarts or a lot of personality. But
because it was that program it was the
number one radio program in Sioux Falls.
So I became, as a high school senior, the
number one radio personality in Sioux Falls,
South Dakota.
I went from there to the University of South
Dakota to study broadcast. I discovered I
had been going to school for four years to do
what I had already done for three years. That
didn't make a lot of sense. Vermillion [South
Dakota] – although it is the school
Newhardth graduated from and has given a
lot of money to – did not have a real good
journalism program. But they had a very
good advertising program. So I ended up
going for a double major: one in advertising
and one in speech because that was my easy
"A." I could always take a speech course
and get my curve up with at least one class
with an "A."
I came out of there with a real
love for advertising and an understanding
for marketing. [I] was invited by Leo
Burnett to go to Chicago to work for his ad
agency [but] chose instead to stay in South
Dakota for a while. Later on I was working
for a TV station in Sioux Falls and was
invited a second time back to Chicago and
decided to take that job. I released the
apartment that [my wife and I] were living
in Sioux Falls. I quit my job at the television
station and was all set to go [when] my wife
came home and said, "Guess what? I'm
pregnant." And my mother-in-law said to
me, "You will not take my daughter to
Chicago while she is carrying my
grandchild." And, being a very macho type
of guy, I said to her, "Yes, Mother.
Whatever you say, Mother." and
immediately had to find employment.
Well, a gentlemen at the television station
just put a radio station on the air down in
Sheldon, Iowa, and he hired me to operate
his remote studio at Sibley. That was in
1962. We moved down there in 1962, and I
was on the air two hours a day. I sold
advertising and did production work the rest
of the time. A few months after I got down
there, a gentlemen that owned the electronic
store came up and said, "Why don't you start
a Shopper? The one we had went bankrupt."
Now that should have told me something.
Well, when you're 22 years old you think
you're infallible, and I thought, "Well, we'll
do that. We'll start a Shopper. And we'll get
it going and we'll sell it and we'll go to
Chicago. It shouldn't change things at all."
So with the second mortgage my wife and I
started our first publication, which was a
Shopper,. We started it in Sibley, Iowa, and
discovered quite quickly that you can't live
out of Sibley, Iowa – the $3,000 is not
enough advertising to support any kind of
publication, let alone one that depends on
advertising exclusively. And so we started
selling ads more regionally, and by the end
of first year we were $60,000 dollars in debt.
It took us another nine years to get out of
debt.
By that time we had no interest in going to
Chicago. We liked northwest Iowa. We
liked Iowa. I liked being in Iowa. My
brother was the president of South Dakota
State University for a number of years. He
thinks South Dakota is the most wonderful
place in the world. I'm glad I grew up there,
but I'm glad I'm in Iowa. And so, about 10
years down the road – a newspaper up in
Worthington, Minnesota, owned by the
Vance Family printing our Shopper for a
number of years – the man that owned the
newspaper up there said, "Why don't you
start a newspaper? You need a soapbox to
preach from. And what you do is you start it,
and when you get it up and going, we'll buy
it from you and you can run it for us. That
way we won't look like we're going into
somebody's town and trying to compete with
them. You'll have done that for us.”
So I did. And he died, and I kept the paper.
We struggled to get all over, to get the
paper started. The first week the N’West
Iowa Review came out as The Sunday Review.
The reason for that was a marketing point:
everyone else came out in the middle of the
week, we came out on Sunday. We had a
chance to cover the news that wasn't
covered, [news] that the papers didn't get
around to until next week. [It] also gave us a
chance to get the sports from Friday night
into the paper on Saturday. But Northwest
Iowa is a very Reformed area: Christian
Reformed and Reformed Church. And the
preachers in the pulpits up there just got
very upset. I was the devil because I had
kids delivering papers on Sunday mornings.
It just got to a point where you say it isn't
worth the battle. It isn't worth the fight.
And so we changed the paper from The
Sunday Review to a Saturday distribution
publication early on in the afternoons.
Eventually we got it to where it's now
delivered by 8:00 in the morning on
Saturday morning to over about 24 different
communities throughout the area. But as we
made the move from Sunday to Saturday we
had to change the name and we were a
regional paper. From the beginning our idea
was to be a paper that served the region, not
a community. Part of that was knowing that
you can't market a paper in one town and
make it work. So we changed the name to
the N’West Iowa Review. It's a very strange
spelling: capital “N,” apostrophe, capital
“W,” small “est.” To us that signifies the
region that we covered, which is also
Urbane, Sioux, Lion counties, and now quite
a bit of Dickenson county. The distribution
area is throughout that whole area. --
Section 2:
Q: Tell us something about the paper right
now: its circulation, how many editorial
employees you have, how many general
employees you've got.
A: I would reverse that question. It's a paper
located in a town of 5,000 population. You
know what small, hometown papers are like.
Some of you come from small hometowns.
What size staff would you guess we have?
How many people would you guess we
employ?
Q: 650?
A: Wow. That would be wonderful. I
shudder now to think what the employment
tax would be every week, but no. Anybody
else have a real, educated guess?
Q: Four or five?
A: That would be what you'd expect,
wouldn't it? Actually, between our printing
operation - White Wolf Web - and our
newspaper operation we have 55 employees.
About 30 of those are in our actual
newspaper operation. We have nine in our
newsroom. That includes two full-time
photographers. Now that may not amaze
you, but it does me. About two years ago we
called over to one of the papers located
along the river, a daily newspaper, and said:
“Our ball team is going to be playing your
ball team this weekend in an upstate game. I
don't want to send one of my photographers
over there to cover it. Will you have your
guy shoot it and just send us some pictures?
We'll pay him for it." To which the guy on
the phone said, "We don't have a
photographer." And the more I looked into
it, the more I discovered there are a lot of
papers that do not have a photographer.
We have two full-time photographers, and
our photographers work very diligently and
make sure the photos illustrate the stories.
They aren't just out taking pictures to fill
space. We have a full-time editor and a full-
time sports editor. We have an associate
editor and we have an editor-at-large - my
son Jay who works out of Des Moines for
us. We have three staff writers and we have
a feature writer that specializes in our
entertainment guide. We have four people in
our design department that do nothing but
design the pages in the paper, and three
people in our front office, five people in
advertising design department who do
nothing but build advertising for the
publications, and then about five people in
our sales department. So that's the crux of
the actual newspaper operation. Then you've
got the sheep-fed operation, and some of the
things that go with it, circulation, and on and
on.
Q: And what is your circulation?
A: The Review - according to the Iowa
Newspaper Association book –has a paid
circulation of 4,553. On top of that there is a
little over 1,000 counter sales. We have
heavy counter sales because it comes out
early on Saturday morning and people want
to get that paper even before it gets
delivered by the mail, if it's a mail delivery
situation. So, about 5,500 [total circulation.]
We're excited about that because there are
five daily newspapers in Northwest Iowa:
Esterville, Storm Lake, Spencer, Cherokee
and LeMars. Esterville has about 2,200 paid
circulation, according to the same book.
Storm Lake, Cherokee and LeMars all are at
the 3,000 level. Spencer is very close to us:
they're 4,500, and we're 4,550.
So, we tend to call ourselves a "once-a-week
daily." We come out on Saturday morning with
everything that a daily paper would have on
a Saturday morning and more. For example,
there are 14 high schools in our region, and
we'll cover all 14 high schools' games on
Friday night. That means all boys basketball
and all girls basketball - so now we've got
28 games - will be in your paper when it
arrives on your doorstep on Saturday
morning, along with a full page of stats.
Right-up-to-the-minute stats from every
single game, telling you whose carried what
ball.
[An] interesting story, a fun story [is] my
son, Jeff – our general manager – was home
and the phone was set up [so] when people
call the office on Saturday morning, and
there was nobody at the office, it rotated to
his house. The individual called about 7:30
in the morning, and Jeff was half-groggy.
He was up most of the night putting the
paper together. And he answered the phone,
“Yeah?" The gal on the phone said, "I want
to subscribe to your paper." And Jeff said,
"Well, can you call back Monday? I'm
taking the call at home and I can't do
anything for you now." "No. I want to
subscribe right now. I want to subscribe to
your paper." Jeff said, "O.K. Can you give
me your credit card number?" And so he
was waking up now, and the lady [went] and
got her credit card.
[She came] back, and he was taking down the
information. He was making small talk, and
he said to her, "Gee, this is interesting.
Why are you so adamant that you have to
subscribe to the paper today?" The lady said,
"Well, my son was in the football game here in
Orange City last night, and you've got his
name in your paper today." And Jeff said,
"Well, yeah, but don't you have a hometown
paper?" "They never get his name in the
paper." "That's wonderful," Jeff said. "What
did he do?" "He kicked the ball." And Jeff
said, "Well, did he have a pretty good
record?" "No. He missed all three times.
But you had him in all the stats as having
kicked the ball three times. That's more
than my local paper's ever done."
Names are still the heart and soul of the
newspaper business. That's why Internet,
television and radio will never put us out of
business. They will never do an adequate job
of what I call "icebox journalism." The kind
of stuff that goes up on the refrigerator, the
stuff that goes in the scrapbook. You all
graduated in the last few years from high
school. Every graduation party you went to
what was hanging on the wall? Every single
[clipping] mom cut out of every paper since
that kid started high school. You know? And
that's what it's all about. We are a paper
record, a paper of pride, as all Iowa papers
should be. --
Section 3:
Q: Is your paper online?
A: No. You're the third person to ask. We
went online for about a year. It just took a
lot of effort to do it, to find the time to do it.
We produced so many products that my
people work a lot of hours as it is. I don't
know, I speak nationally to a lot of
organizations, about 30 times a year. I'll
speak to different press associations on
publishing, and I have not yet found a
newspaper that makes money from being
online. Since we have so many other ways
that we can make money in the legitimate
business of publishing, we have never gotten
that job done. [Driving over today,] Jay and
I talked business, which is what we've
always done.
Both my sons will tell you they grew up with
their feet under the table, talking business.
The dining room table every night was
business. That's what we did every night, we
talked business. That was our life. But anyway,
Jay is convincing me that we need to go online
with our sports franchise. And I think probably
we will do that. It's not because I don't believe
in it, it's just that unless it can produce
money or have a value, there are so many things
we can do otherwise that I just don't want to put
the time into it.
Q: Can you make money advertising
online? Does that produce a lot of profit like
your paper too?
A: The Minneapolis Tribune has reinvented
their online presence five times because the
first four times they lost money. If a paper in
Minneapolis, Minnesota cannot make an
online presence make money, how does a
paper in Shelton, Iowa, or any small town in
Iowa make that happen? I'm on the
[advisory] cabinet of a man who is planning
to run for governor of Iowa. We meet once a
month. We were talking the other day about
one of the columnists in The Des Moines
Register and his comments about one of the
other possible candidates, and I said, "Gee, I
don't get my Register until the afternoon
because it comes by mail in Northwest Iowa.
You can't get it delivered to my door in the
morning, so I haven't had a chance to read it
yet." Well he said, "I don't get the Register. I
read it online." Now how much of your
subscription base do you lose eventually
because you're online with your principal
pieces? But if you can do it like with a
sports franchise, I think that has some value
for us. No, I'm not a big believer in online
presence for newspaper publishers.
So if there wasn't a single source that was
bringing consensus to the community. If
everybody around town went to their
favorite website to see what the ideas were,
would there be consensus? If that doesn't
happen, if you don't come together to be as a
community to do something, do you ever
have the new growth? The new buildings?
The new ideas? The new services?
Newspapers are vital to a community if the
community is going to hold together and
grow together. That's one of the real
problems. Brad Hume and I talked about this
one night. We were visiting Washington
D.C., and at that point he was still with
ABC. He said, "I could go home and sit
down in my study, and I can open up my
computer and reach anything on the ABC
grid. I have access to everything that's on the
ABC computer system because I am one of
the reporters. I can pick up the English news
service. I can pick up the Associated Press
news service. I can pick up service after
service after service."
“But,” he said, "Do you know how I get my news
everyday, before I get into the office? I don't
go sit down and read the computer. It gets
boring after awhile. I pick up the Washington
Post off the front doorstep of my house as I
walk out the door. I read it on the subway going
into town. And that is already prepared,
categorized and analyzed. I get more out of
there that I could possibly get sitting in front
of the TV screen for hours and hours and
hours."
So I'm not going to give up my franchise in
print, and subsidize it with online when they
need my print franchise to make things
happen. I can tell you a story about that.
Sheldon, Iowa, went through a tremendously
bad economic period. [About last
September,] the town started to question its
economic accessibility; it's economic value,
and whether it could even continue to
remain as a vital community. We've lost a
lot of businesses. The town was not
responding to anything positive at all that
was going on in the community. We finally,
in January, were so frustrated about it that in
our Sheldon Mail-Sun, our hometown paper,
we started running full-page ads on the back
page. We paid for it, just full-page ads. And
the ads said, "Sheldon is building and
booming."
We had a picture of the new
addition to the hospital being built,
sponsored by Iowa Information Publications
and the community corporation. Nobody
paid for the ad. We did, but gave them
recognition on the ad. Next week: "Sheldon
is building and booming," [and there was] a
picture of the new car dealership going up
on the edge of town. Next week: "Sheldon is
building and booming," [and there was] a
picture of the middle school out in the
middle of nowhere nobody sees that is going
up. Week after week: "Sheldon is building
and booming." People are starting to talk
about it: "Hey, Sheldon is a pretty good
place after all. Things are happening."
We rolled that over into a series of
advertisements. That now has a full page ad
on one side sponsored by X number of
businesses – little small ads every week. But
on the other side of the page is a full-page ad
from someone explaining how they're
helping Sheldon build and boom.
Meanwhile, we've had any number of new
businesses announce to come to town. The
economic development record told the
Sibley chamber of commerce two weeks ago
– and that's where I got it from – this never
would have happened [if it had not been] for
the newspaper. They're the ones that made
this happen. They're the ones that had a
belief in the community and made
something happen in the community. That is
what we can do as a newspaper.
Q: Is that what you should be doing as a
newspaper?
A: It's one of the things I need to do. I need
to be both the cheerleader for the
community and also the test of whether the
community is right or wrong. You'll find
many editorials in my paper where we have
called the city council, for example, to task.
Or someone else to task – the school board
[for example.] It's interesting because when
we're all done, those people still come back
and talk to us in a respectful, friendly matter
[even though] we've called them to task, and
sometimes quite seriously. I was out
speaking in Connecticut, and I had the
mayor of the community call me long
distance at my hotel to give me pure hell
because of an editorial we had just written.
They had just read the editorial, but I hadn't
seen it yet. So when he called me he caught
me completely off guard. So I had to say,
"Let me check this all out. I'll see you
Monday, and we'll talk about it." But he was
mad. Meanwhile, I visited with Jay and
some of the others that were at the office,
and found out what the editorial was and had
a copy faxed to me. [I] walked in on
Monday and said, "You know, you've got
this thing all backwards. What the editorial
said was, 'da da da,' not what you're
presuming it said." And he said, "Yeah, I
can see now I misread it." I said, "Are we
still friends?" "Yeah." We bear-hugged each
other, and walked out the door. That's part
of my job. If I don't boost the community,
who’s going to?
Q: Well, traditionally it has been the role of
a weekly newspaper to be a booster of the
community. Businesses will falter, and the
weekly paper is a key business.
A: I've got an excellent situation going in
my operation, because I have an editor, and
he has a friend, an editor-at-large, and they
run that newsroom. The newsroom does not
run a story because I say "Run the story."
That's their newsroom. But the other pages,
what we do editorially, advertising-wise and
promotional-wise, that's my role. So I might
come out with an ad saying,: "da da da da."
And the editorial department has an editorial
saying the exact opposite. If that's the case,
then we'd better get together and find out
where one of us is going askew. But that's
their role. They're not going to be punished
by me for doing it. My editorial people are
the check and balance. As the publisher, my
job is to grow the community. That clarify
it? --
Section 4:
Q: What's your definition of community
journalism. Is that what the N'West Iowa
Review does, or does it do [traditional]
journalism?
A: No. The Sheldon Mail-Sun does
community journalism. This was my
competitor 15-17 years ago when I bought it
out. Now, at that time they published twice a
week. They called it the Sheldon Mail on
Wednesday and the Sheldon Sun on
Saturday. And of course our Review came
out on Saturday against the Sun. When we
bought out this paper 16 years ago, we
brought them together as one publication. It
comes out now on Wednesdays, and this is
our hometown paper. If someone has a
fender bender in Shelby, you will not read
about it in the Review. If somebody spits on
the sidewalk, it's going to be in the middle
of the Sun, because this is the community.
We want to protect the community. And
you're going to find that all of the stories in
here are what happened in the local school,
for example, the new teachers in school this
year. [It has] everything that has to do with
our community and the growth of our
community. This not only has the local
public school, there's St. Patrick's and
there's the Christian school – all three of the
schools. There's a story about our National
Guard going off to Iraq. We just had the
guard unit called up in Sheldon. It's also on
the front page of the Review. It gets into
both publications. Here's a story about the
local economic development people,
prospecting for new opportunities to fill
some of the building space. There are very
little sports, just some local sports in [the
Mail-Sun.] But this is the paper that is going
to reach that local market.
We put out a calendar once a year. It's a
national calendar – you can hang it on the
wall – but each person who sponsors a
month in the calendar gets that ad repeated
as a full-page in the Mail-Sun with all of the
events for the month in it, so that they can
keep track of what's going on. These
[events] are not listed in the [wall] calendar.
We do a lot of things for the community.
This is our hometown paper, and that's what
most hometown papers are. This is our
Saturday paper. This is the one that Jay, and
Connie, and Jeff and I started back long,
long, long ago. Jay was in grade school
when we started this. [He was] six years old.
Now I have four full time designers that just
design this paper, and my other products,
and do the color separations and all that type
of thing.
There's the news lead. There are a
couple more pages from the news section.
These stories are stories from the region. If
Rock Rapids has a problem with its wells,
that's a story we want to cover because if
Rock Rapids is having water problems,
perhaps then soon it's going to be in George,
then it'll be in Sibley, then it'll be in
Southerland. So we want to aware if the
other towns there are making some progress
on getting ready for how they're going to
handle that. [There is] a page-and-a-half of
editorial material in here. Now that's just
one section.
On top of that you've got, every single week,
you've got an Accent section. This particular
Accent section was dedicated to Sioux
Center, which is about 40 miles away from
us. But inside that section also are all the
weddings, the funerals, the obituaries,
everything, and that's from the whole region.
It's not just Sheldon [that’s included in the
section.] That's anybody in the area that has
a wedding, or a death, or whatever it might
be. Then on top of that is our sports section.
These are all common every single time.
This is the first week of sports this year, so
there wasn't a lot of sports because only
about three teams played. But sports goes to
press at 4:00 in the morning, it's the last
section that is done by six and out the door
by six.
Again, if I grabbed the next paper
down the line, you'd see about eight pages of
sports. This one is not very much because
not very much was happening in that first
week. Here is the "where to go and what do
to" section. It accents all the things that are
happening in the region this week. Here is
the football preview section. This was our
gift to the school, we did this for the school.
We designed it, wrote most of it, printed it,
and inserted it at no cost whatsoever to our
community college in Sheldon, Iowa. It's an
attempt to get the levee renewed, so they can
continue to have financing coming out of the
six-county area for our education program.
That's one of the ways that we can give back
to the area.
But that's just one paper. This paper is
written for five counties. If you live in
Milford, Iowa, and subscribe to this paper –
and people do in Dickenson County – you
can pick it up and find out how your team
did last night against all of the other teams
that are in your conference. --
Section 5:
Q: Besides making a profit, what do you
want to accomplish with your newspaper?
A: I'd like to make a profit once, that'd be
nice. We make a profit, not a big profit. My
wife said the other day, "The difference
between our operation and a lot of
newspapers is we put a lot of money back
into the paper.” So there isn't always as
much money for us as we'd like to have. But
we've lived a good life. We haven't lived a
bad life, so I'm not upset about that. But I
don't want you to sit here and think that
we've made huge profits. We have a lot of
salaries to pay, and that gobbles up a lot.
There are people who would tell you we
have too much salary to pay, that you don't
need to have that many writers to pay or that
many designers.
But, besides making a profit, what do I want
to do? I want to see the people in my part of
the state of Iowa understand those things that
are affecting their lives today and tomorrow.
I also want them to have the opportunity to
take the most of all of the opportunities that
are given to them. I want to be the catalyst
that brings communities together. There was an
age, back when Henry Ford wasn't around
yet, where you put a town every seven miles
on the railroad track because that's all the
further you could go with a horse and
buggy, or horses and a load of corn. A lot of
those towns now have just disappeared
because you can get in a car in Sheldon or
Sibley and be in Sioux Falls in one hour. So
why shop in Sheldon where there's 20
stores, when you can go to Sioux Falls
where there's 5,000 stores?
But what's actually happening is, as we
evolve and we become knowledgeable of the
fact that now my four counties are 40 miles
from corner to corner. There are towns that
to drive from corner to corner you drive 40
miles, so why is it now that Sioux Center
and Sheldon are at odds? They are one
community. And I have one paper for one
community, the golden corner of Northwest
Iowa. Sioux Center got a new Pella factory,
and [an increasing] number of people. Sioux
Center hasn't got housing for all those
people.
My recommendation – and I wrote it
in the paper and nobody picked up on it –
was buy a big yellow bus, park it down in
the parking lot of the city offices, and then
tell people, "Go to work at Pella. Be here at
a certain point and leave your car in the
parking lot.” I'll even give them free papers
on the bus. “Get on the bus every morning,
and the bus will take you to Pella. You can
sleep on the way over. Work at Pella and enjoy
yourself. When you get off work, the bus will
be there to bring you back home.�� Look at all
the dollars you'd be bringing into Sheldon
every week because they'll be driving their own
cars and they wouldn't have the chance to go
to a grocery store there. But we've got to
quit fighting each other and start considering
that we are one community. That's how
Iowa can become great. Greater. --
Section 6:
Q: Considering what you want to do for
your readers, where does national and
international news stand? How much
emphasis do you put on it? I saw that you
covered the Olympics through the eyes of
some people who went there. What do you
do about national and international activities
[and their] impact on Northwest Iowa?
A: Well, I hope that if you're smart enough
to be a buyer of the N'West Iowa Review,
that you are also smart enough to recognize
that you need to buy three papers. A
minimum of three newspapers. You need to
buy whatever papers serves your hometown
community, because they still have things
about happenings in your town that aren't
going to be in the Review – whether it's a
pancake supper or whatever it might be. You
also need to buy a good, daily newspaper. I
can't claim to be one of those that thinks the
Register is still a pretty good paper, [but] in
my corner of the state I'd rather see you buy
that than the Sioux City Journal, or the
Worthington Daily Globe, or the Sioux Falls
Argus, who are all fighting for that same
readership. I just wish that the Register
would get their act back together and give us
back morning delivery rather than making us
do it whenever they get around to sending it
in the mail.
But I don't think that I have a responsibility
to cover national news. Only if I can do it as
with that story on the Olympics, through
someone local who was involved and
participatory. We have two girls that went
off from Northwest Iowa. One went to Spain
and one went to Italy this fall. And both of
them, without the other knowing about the
first, came to our offices. One's from Sioux
Center and one is from Orange City, I
believe. We haven't published her yet. But
both said, "Would it be possible, while I'm
over in Italy, and I'm over in Spain, for me
to file a story with you every three or four
weeks on what's happening in my life as an
exchange student in that country?" They are
actually attending college over there; they're
not just going over there on a simple
exchange program. And I said, "That's great.
We need to do that. We need, very much, to
get ideas and ideals from elsewhere."
I've been invited by the government of
China, the government of Taiwan, the
government of Hong Kong, the United Arab
Emeritus, Egypt [to come to their countries.]
This last January I led a delegation of
publishers to Tunisia to go over and
discover what those countries are all about.
We have a terrible thing about our
relationship with those folks who are
Muslim or Arab. And yet we're judging
them on what we read in the national press,
and upon some people that are way beyond
the extreme, who violated two buildings that
we loved in New York. But if you go over
and live with the people over there and
spend some time with them, [you find that]
they are nice people. There are some very
good people over there.
I took along a delegation of seven different
friends of mine from the states to Tunisia.
We walked down the streets by these great big
coffee places. Over there they celebrate the
art of doing nothing. They sit and drink coffee
out on the big, cement patios in front of their
cafes, and as we walked by you could hear them
say, "Americans. Americans." It was just
fascinating, and you know what we'd do, my
newspaper publisher friends of mine and
myself? We turned around and walked right
into the patio area and said, "Hi. I'm Peter
Wagner. I'm from Iowa." And pretty soon
[they’d say,] "Americans! Americans!" If
we could get government out of
government, I think we could like each
other.
Q: Given the economic conditions, most
people cannot afford [to buy three papers.] It
seems to me that's one of the problems of
the United States: newspapers are becoming
prohibitively expensive for many people to
subscribe to. I just see that you have this
great opportunity with the Review, to do
much more for readers by saying, "O.K. If
you buy the Register for your national and
international coverage, that's fine, but we
can do some of this stuff in our own paper."
A: Well, I wrote about my Tunisian
experiences. When we were in China, the
number two man in the Communist Party
was one of our hosts. We had an opportunity
to go sit down in this very palatial room, and
drink green tea and talk to this man for
about an hour. One of the questions I asked
him was about how much longer, viewing
the country the way it was, how much
longer would China continue to be a
Communist country? And he said, "Ah,
you've caught it. You understand." He said,
"We can't remain Communists another 15
years because of the fact that we're building
our economy so much on the entrepreneurial
system, the people that are actually
providing the moneys."
Did you know that the number one contention
between Taiwan and China [is that] Taiwan
imports 37 percent of [the supplies] which they
use in the manufacture process from plants they
own in China? You can't get along without the
numbers that China have to manufacture
anymore. He said, "Within 50 years, we will
be a democratic country. Stop and think
about it, we've only been Communists for 50
years. Before that we were ruled by
emperors for generations and generations
and generations."
Now my response to you is, "Give me
another ten or 15 years. Maybe I'll also be
that national newspaper you want. Maybe in
five years.” I just talked Jay back into
coming onboard. The reason is because he
lives in Des Moines. And if I'm going to be
a state daily, then I've got to have material
coming out of Des Moines that's fresh, and
original and key to our audience. What
better opportunity than the man who helped
start this paper in the fist place – although he
was only six years old – being the one who
starts writing? If you notice, there's a letter
from Des Moines now in that editorial page
every single week. Jay e-mails those up to
us at some point during the week. But, in
those letters, he calls back on all the years he
grew up in Northwest Iowa, and he is
bringing parallels. So, yeah, I want to go
where you want to go, but I started this
paper in 1972 with three subscribers. The
first paper went out with three subscribers,
and 5,000 sample copies. It takes a long time
to start a paper from scratch. --
Section 7:
Q: Do you think it's been a different
experience having done everything with
your family, instead of all on your own? Has
it improved your career?
A: I would have never made it without my
family. Never. My wife has been involved.
She's done everything she had to do all the
years when no one else would do it. She's
down now to where she does what she wants
to do, and that's fine. Jay followed Larry
Erickson in an editorial position. Susan
Weaver, [who is] now is at the Des Moines
Register, was an editor for us for about a
year. Larry Erickson was a phenomenal
person in establishing where the paper's
direction was going to go early on. Larry is
with the Merideth Company editing
magazines for them today. Tim Rice, who
was one of our early sports editors and who
really set the theme for our sports section, is
now the editor of the sports section up in
Rochester, Minnesota. Jay came along and
took it through a whole new change, where
he was able to handpick and bring people in.
Jeff Grant was a handpick of his. Jeff
Grant's still with us today, and [he is] the
heart of the editing operation and the
management of the newsroom operation.
My son Jeff created the original style of the
paper. We still [use] that design now, and
it's been 25 years down the road. His wife,
Mirna, has a degree in magazine art
direction from Iowa State University. I said
to the kids, "I don't care who you marry, just
make sure they help the business.” Jay's
married to an attorney who does all our legal
work for us. We're blessed. Without the
family, I'm not sure we would have done it.
It's been very important to us. But it is a
family-owned paper, and you can come into
the company and talk to the those people
that are in the building every single day, and
they will tell you something about us. It's
not quite as bad as it was once years and
years ago, but they'll see two Wagners stand
in the middle of one of the buildings and
scream at each other at the top of their
lunges because we don't agree on something.
But once we've done that, it's forgotten. We
come to a conclusion, we make a decision,
we go forward, and that's the end of it. And
that's not unusual. --
Section 8:
Q: How much do you pay? One of the
reasons I ask, is it's clearly a unique paper,
and it's a unique experience working there.
And obviously it's highly reputable and wins
awards. So I wonder why anyone would
want to leave the paper. Would it be
financial? Would they use it as a stepping
stone to go on to bigger and better things?
What's the pattern of people that work for
you? Do they move on up or do they stick
around for years?
A: Unfortunately, not enough of them move
on anymore. I say that because when you
have people that stay with you year after
year after year, it's wonderful. They create a
sense of history. They know the problems,
so they don't fall back on the same traps year
after year with Mrs. So-and-so who comes
every year and wants a story published
about her homegrown tomato that looks like
President Nixon, or whatever it might be.
But the problem is that you also have to
increase their salaries – they expect cost of
living increases – and that keeps [increasing
costs] up higher and higher.
Early on when we first were in business we
could afford to have one or two of those
[high income workers] because most departments
[had] a swinging door so we started with lower
level people and kept bringing them up again.
So it is a problem today. Editorially, in our
newsroom, a just-out-of-college writer [is
going to make] about $23,000, which
probably doesn't sound like a lot of money
but that's what it's going be to be. If you're
an editor: $30,000 to $40,000. About the
best you can do in photography now is
$28,000. You want to get a good
photographer. If you're going to pay him
less than $28,000 a year you're not going to
get him. There are so few of them coming
out of college. Colleges are not producing
good press photographers. And so if they're
any good Gannette's going to grab them and
they're going to offer them about $23,000 or
$27,000. So if [I] want them to come to
Sheldon, Iowa, [I need to] give them
$28,000.
I've got sales people that make $20,000.
I've got sales people that make $80,000.
So it just depends. [Sales is] where
the money is. And that gives you some cross
of where the money is at. Why do I lose
them? Normally I lose them because their
wife is bored with the small town. Most of
the people I lose are men that [leave]
because their wives are bored. Men can find
good jobs. Women can't always find good
jobs when their husband works for the
paper. So one of the things we're trying to
do is promote industry and opportunities that
create job opportunities for women.
Q: You mentioned earlier that you had a
reporter that covered feature stories and
focused mainly on entertainment stories.
What type of entertainment stories did that
entail? Is it strictly confined to local plays
and things like that, or does he have a lot of
liberty?
A: He goes all the way from Sioux Falls to
Sioux City to Okoboji. This summer I
suggested to him that he might consider
doing a series called "Where's Bob?" and he
jumped at it. What he did was, starting early
in June and all the way through the summer
he volunteered for some unusual position at
one of businesses at Okoboji. One week he
ran one of the carnival rides at Arnold's
Park. Another week he took tickets at the
summer theater. Another week he seated
people at the summer theater. Another week
he sold ice cream bars at the minibar stand.
Then each week he would write a story
about that side of the business, what's it like
to be the one taking care of the people that
come in screaming, "I want a minibar now,
and you aren't waiting on me fast enough,"
and whatever it might be. [The
entertainment section] also has play reviews.
We do reviews of all the summer theater
plays in Okoboji, which are done by Stevens
College out of Columbia. It's an excellent
repertory theater. We do stories about
anything and everything that happens at the
lakes, as well as major happenings in small
towns around us or major markets around
us. He has a pretty large beat. --
Section 9:
Q: What are three memorable stories that
your paper has published that you are
proudest of?
A: The first would be Welfare. I always go
back to this story. A fellow in Sibley, Iowa,
a sweet old guy [who] owned a gas station.
His name was Rod Gelberth. Rod came to
work one day at the Scully Station - the
station has been gone for years now – and
there was a little white dog cuddled up in the
doorway of his gas station whimpering and
just completely lost, no question about it.
Rod was soft-hearted and took the dog in,
and gave it a place behind the counter in a
big box with all kinds of rags and things to
lay on. [He] named it "Welfare" because
without Rod it had nothing. It was
depending on Rod's good support, so it was
on welfare. Rod might be loving, but he
wasn't very smart because pretty soon he
discovered that this was in fact a female dog
and this dog was in fact pregnant.
He took care of the dog: took it to the vet,
saw it through the delivery of the pups, and
then saw the pups reach their six-week period
with Welfare. When the pups finally were at
the right age where they needed to find
homes, [he] proceeded to hand them out to
his customers, people who came to his
station for gas or for service work. But you
didn't just come in and say, "I want a dog."
You had to come in and give him chapter
and verse. Where was it going to stay? What
was it going to be fed? Were there kids in
the house? Who would watch it during the
daytime? When those dogs were placed, it
was like the Lutheran church doing adoption
placement of children. It was just wonderful.
The story ran on [page] three or one of the
Review that week.
The same week, the high school in Sibley,
the central school, burned to the ground. My
son Jeff was our lead photographer at that
point, even though he was still in school. He
was probably a freshman in high school. He
had gone to the Nikon Agency and learned
from Jim Brandenburg, the photographer.
Jim Brandenburg did a lot of stuff, still is
doing a lot of stuff for National Geographic.
He did the "White Wolf" series, which is
where our printing plant is named after. He
did the “White Wolf" series for National
Geographic, and he was at the Worthington
Globe. Jim would just teach Jeff, so Jeff was
a pretty good photographer. When the fire
started I called the principal and said, "Mr.
Robertson, you have to let Jeff out of school
because we have to have him shoot the fire
for us." And so they did.
[It was] in the middle of the afternoon and
Jeff shot way into the night. The school
burned to the ground. So in that same issue,
we had three pages of photographs, and many
pages of stories, covering the history of the
school and all of things about the school and
the ramifications of the fire and all of the
pictures of the fire. To me, [it was] a
tremendous news story. One of the real
stories of the community. Six months later if
you'd ask someone about that particular
issue of the paper, they'd remember Welfare,
they wouldn't remember the story about the
school burning down. I just thought that was
a tremendous story.
One of the stories that I think also was very
important was a story on a man up in
Germany who was a runaway from the
German army, and had snuck out of the
German army [after being] involved in some
of the atrocities. He didn't believe in what
was going on. He had run away and
somehow changed everything and moved to
George, Iowa, and set himself up with
another name and lived for generations in
that town. Everybody was thinking he came
from "here" when he had come from "there."
Everybody was thinking he was "this" when
he was "this." [He] was very confused about
his own life because he was not pleased with
the experiences he had under the Hitler
regime and what he had done under the
regime.
But he wanted to come clean and
announce his story, to come clean with the
communities. Of course that was the week
that we were hit by 9/11 and the story got
bumped off the front page because our front
page coverage was on 9/11. By the way, our
front page coverage on 9/11 was so intense
and so complete that The New York Times
sent a photographer and a reporter out and
actually did a story on how we covered 9/11.
The story about the man from Germany
finally appeared in the paper about two
weeks later, and we got it out. It was one of
those stories that almost didn't make it, and I
think that is very fascinating.
We do 40 stories a week, and all of them are
important. When you do them they're very
important. We did an extra once. I don't
have a copy of it in our files and I'm just
heartbroken. On Sunday afternoon – we
published the morning before and the paper
was off for the week – about 4:00 in the
afternoon sirens went off and a tornado
came through and ripped out 10 or 15
houses in Sibley. Within a matter of 20
minutes my staff was all there. We made
some phone calls, we shot pictures, did
stories for people that had been affected by
it and how it effected their lives. One lady,
I remember, was down in the bathroom of her
apartment building, a two-story apartment
building. She was down in the basement
showering. The tornado came through and
whipped away everything. She stood down
there purely naked. She didn't have any
clothes to put on; it was all whipped away.
Her boyfriend came over to my house and
borrowed things from my wife. He went in
the closet and picked out panties and a bra,
and other things so she would something to
put because everything was lost. We put out
an extra, it came out on Tuesday. Not only
did it come out, it was economically very
profitable. We did the extra [not only] for
the news coverage value and the fact that it
was a story and needed to be documented,
but we sold a lot of advertising into it.
Those would be three [stories I am most
proud of.] Do you remember the deer story?
One of the things that's kind of fun is if you
watch Sioux City TV, either KMEG which
is the CBS station or KTIV, the NBC
station, or KCAU, which is the ABC station,
and watch the Monday and Tuesday nights
and you'll see the Review. Whatever our
Accent feature is on Saturday, one of those
stations will jump on it either Monday or
Tuesday and that's going to be their feature
story on Monday or Tuesday's television
coverage. One particular one was about a gal
over at Hall and she adopted this baby deer.
And somehow she housebroke this deer.
How you housebreak a deer, I don't know,
but she did.
We found out about it and went over and did
an Accent feature. She hand-fed the deer and
sat on her davenport and when she'd tell it to
it'd go over to its corner. It was just a
fascinating story. What fascinated
me so much more than that was the next
night, Monday night, it was on KTIV and it
was like they had discovered this out of
nowhere all by themselves. They made
about three times as much out of it as we
did. I thought we made more out of it than it
deserved, but I though it was an interesting
story. There's just a lot of interesting stories
out there. Remember the old TV story:
There's a million stories in the naked city?
Well there are. There's a million stories in
Sibley or Sheldon or Hall or Boyden or any
of those towns we cover. --
Section 10:
Q: As a cheerleader for the community,
would you consider it divisive to do an in-
depth investigation of a local corporation
that was perhaps, polluting the ground
water?
A: I've done that. The Midwest Farmer's
Co-op elevator had a situation where run-off
from their fertilization operation got into the
creek and killed off hundreds and hundreds
of fish. About a year later the elevator up in
Allendorf did the same thing, and we did
stories on both of them, even though both of
them came into our offices before the stories
came out and said, "If you do that, we won't
do anymore business with you." The
decision on that was: "O.K. If that's what's
going to make the difference between
having your business and not, goodbye." We
are a paper of record. If Jay taught me one
thing during his years at editor it is that in
50 years from now, 100 years from now, people
are going to look back on my paper to see
what the true facts were, and if I'm not going
to publish everything as concisely as I can
and as correctly as I can, whether I am
approving or unapproving, financially
affected or unaffected, then I've not done my
job as a publisher.
The interesting thing about it is [people]
always forget. Somewhere down the line they
come back and do business again, so that's
not a real problem. Another situation we have
constantly is somebody coming in and
saying, "You know, I got picked up
shoplifting, and I'm a bank employee, and
I'm just not sure if you put it in the police
report, my mother will just have a heart
attack and die, etc." When people tell me
that, I come back and say there was a time a
number of years ago when I got really upset
about some things happening in the business
and I got in the car to go out and see an
advertiser out on the edge of town. In the
process of doing that I went right by his
driveway. I looked both ways and there was
nobody coming. I did a U-turn on the
highway so I could go back and see this guy,
but I was still enraged and I didn't look
carefully enough.
The car coming down the highway hit me, got
thrown into the ditch, went down a great deal
of a distance in that ditch, and hit the
embankment. [The driver] was hospitalized.
It was an employee of Handy Calf Village,
one of our real major businesses there.
The next Wednesday when the paper came out
and the police blotter was there, there was
the information, that Peter Wagner was
involved in an accident of his own accord that
hospitalized somebody. Now if I won't leave my
own name out of the paper, am I going to leave
yours out of the paper? --
Section 11:
Q: I would imagine that you've had some
offers to sell out to a larger company or a
newspaper chain. Have you ever been
tempted to do so?
A: A couple of years ago we were. During
the real height of the buying rage, we had
three phone calls in a period of about three
weeks, from three different brokers
representing three different chains - not
having seen our books, and not even having
been to our office to see the offices, simply
making the decision based on the product
we put out. The first call was $3 million, the
second call was $7 million, and the third call
was $10 million. I don't believe that any of
the three knew the other two were doing
this. I don't think this was planned that way,
it just happened to come that way.
At $10 million I sat down with Jeff and Mirna
in Sheldon and I came down and sat down with
Jay and CC in Des Moines. I said, "You
know, this is your business too. You own
stock in this company. I can't just anymore
say, 'No, we can't sell.' What do you want us
to do?" Both of the boys, and their wives
supported their husbands, and both of the
boys said, "We want to keep the business." I
don't think we could get $10 million today. I
think if a bidding war went up again, the re-
assessment of the value of newspapers, the
less enthusiasm there is for buying papers,
sporadically just to put a cluster group
together, is not as strong as it once was.
We'd be lucky if we'd get $7 million. But I
think we'd probably get seven for it if we
want to put it on the market. Will we? As
long as I've got a son that wants the papers,
no. We're learning that you don't have to live
in Sheldon, Iowa to participate in the
newspapers. If we have two [sons interested
in working on the paper], then we can figure
out ways for them both to do it. --
Section 12:
Q: You were once said to have thought that
these buy-outs were a good thing for weekly
newspapers. Why do you say that? Why did
you resist?
A: That's somewhat of a misquote. I didn't
say that I thought the buy-outs were a good
thing for weekly newspapers, I said that you
need to watch what is happening with the
buy-outs. What's happening is, for example,
the paper at Spencer, Iowa, turned around
and bought the paper at Spirit Lake, and
turned and bought the paper at Storm Lake,
well actually it was Spencer, Storm Lake
and Cherokee and then they bought Spirit
Lake, Carroll and Lake Park. What I said
was, there's going to come a point when
they're not going to want to own those small
papers, those little tiny papers. They're
going to regurgitate those and spit them out,
and sell them off cheap to get rid of them.
To them they are just pulling down the
bottom line, and at that point, a smart young
lady like yourself could come in and get that
paper for dimes on the dollar or pennies on
the dollar to turn it around, put your heart
and soul into it, become part of that
community, and have an opportunity to
rebirth that paper and make it effective both
financially and as a voice for the
community. I've never really felt that the
chain buy-out of every single paper on the
market with the thought that they are going
to create a cluster group, and with the cluster
group going to have all this printing
opportunity, has been good for the
community or the newspaper industry. Does
that clarify it for you?
Q: Good for entrepreneurs that want to start
their own papers?
A: Right, I still believe that the
entrepreneur is the best publisher of a
newspaper. But you also have to understand
that that's never going to happen. When I
grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, you
could go anywhere you wanted from my
house in any direction two blocks and there
was a neighborhood grocery. Every two or
three blocks there would be a neighborhood
grocery. Bob Powell owned it and ran it.
They had a candy counter, they had a meat
counter, they had canned goods, they had
papers; it was just a convenient place to go
to get groceries. People did not buy
groceries at a big grocery store day after day
after day. Eventually the big chains came
along. The Hy-Vees did to those stores what
Wal-Mart's now doing to Hy-Vee. Those
stores disappeared.
People said, "They're gone forever." Now we've
got Casey's [and] Kum & Go – they’re just a
rebirth of that same philosophy. You get your
bread, your milk, your ice cream, whatever you
want at a corner convenient store where you get
your gas, too. [The neighborhood grocery
stores] aren't gone, they've just been
reinvented in a different format. Why would it
be unusual for us to have newspapers owned by
chains? Funeral homes are owned by chains.
There are national chains of funeral homes.
Car dealerships are owned by chains. In
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, there's one
independently-owned car dealership left, all
the rest are owned by Ithac, and they're
located in North Dakota or out in Oregon.
Car dealerships aren't locally-owned
anymore. I've got a bank in Sibley, Iowa –
it’s the bank of the month club. Every single
month there's a new sign hanging over that's
a piece of plastic because they don't have the
chance to put the new sign up before they
have to sell again. Banks are owned by
chains. That's the economy of the world.
So why would you not expect newspapers to
be owned by chains? Is that bad? Not
necessarily. There are some editors of chain
newspapers that do an extremely good job of
reflecting the community they deserve.
There are some editors of chain newspapers
that could care less about anything but the
paycheck. There are some independently-
owned newspapers that have the same
situation. I'm not going to condemn chain
ownership of papers. I think when they go
through and they say, "I'm going to buy this
whole cluster," that's not right. They've got
to be more succinct to what matches and
what doesn't match, and where they can be a
benefit and where they can't be a benefit.
Ganette for example. Should Ganette own
the paper in Des Moines? Why not? They're
doing a fairly good job of it. You can ask
Iowa Boy about that and he'll tell you
differently, and he writes for us now so
we're real thrilled about that. Overall I think
they give a pretty phenomenal, well-
balanced coverage of life in Iowa. I look at
that paper and they're doing a phenomenal
job of reproduction. I'm mad at them
because I can't get my paper in the morning.
Stop and think about it: it's a five hour drive
from Des Moines to Sibley, Iowa, that we
get [the paper] at all is amazing. The Argus
Leader isn't a bad paper; it isn't a good paper,
either. It depends on whose heading it up.
That's not chain ownership – the community can
respond to that. They can go into that guy's
office as easily as they can mine and say, "I
don't like what you're doing."
