Peter Wagner interview about journalism career, Iowa City, Iowa, September 8, 2004

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. -- <br><br> 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. -- <br><br> 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? -- <br><br> 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. -- <br><br> 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. -- <br><br> 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. -- <br><br> 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. -- <br><br> 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. -- <br><br> 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. -- <br><br> 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? -- <br><br> 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. -- <br><br> 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."