‘Really valuable’: Anaconda loses its newspaper

ANACONDA — For as long as Robbie Dee can remember being an adult, he’s been a subscriber to the Anaconda Leader newspaper.

The Anaconda native and longtime advertiser with the Leader is hanging on to the final edition of the 55-year-old two days per week local paper, which abruptly shuttered last week. 

“Finding out what’s going on in your town, a lot of that you get through the whispers, sure,” Dee said, holding a copy. “But there’s a lot of stuff in here that you don’t get through the whispers.”

The June 5 edition Dee had on his desk was the Leader’s last, with a story on its website citing “the impact of inflation and the rising costs of operations” as reasons for its closure.

Staff were told about the closure on June 8.

The Leader was founded in 1970, a post on the newspaper’s website says.  An older paper, the Anaconda Standard, was created in 1889, but was eventually folded into what became the Montana Standard in 1928. The town has had some local radio coverage over the years too, but a station created in 1946 eventually shut down in 2017, leaving the Leader as the sole media of record.

Even this week, paper copies could be found across the town, from Coffee Corral to Taco Time, where Dee would sometimes read the paper while he waited for a lunch order. Some people got them mailed, as far away as his brother in Michigan, Dee said. Those days are gone now, with Anaconda residents left with a short news story on the Leader’s website.

“We thank Anaconda for the last 55 years we’ve been in business. This community has been very good to our family,” Van Neitz, owner of Leader Printing & Supply, said in the story.

Van Neitz is the son of the paper’s founder, Dean Neitz, who died in 2019. The Philipsburg Mail (now part of the Silver State Post) and the Whitehall Ledger, which appeared to still be active this week, were also started under Dean Neitz. A call to a number listed for Van Neitz resulted in a disconnected line message.

A sign on the paper’s door, at 121 Main Street, read “Permanently closed” and thanked the community. “We deeply regret to inform our customers and readers that the Anaconda Leader is no longer in business,” the sign reads.

James Rosien, the former editor of the Leader, said on Friday it was “really weird” to not be finalizing the day’s newspaper. He’d been at the paper for almost 15 years. 

Community members have been supportive of the work the paper did, he said, noting many people in Anaconda helped contribute to it, paid and not.

“The quality of the people that we have here,” Rosien said. “I’m extremely grateful for their trust that they had in me to be able to provide a platform for them for all these years.”

Rosien, along with Kasey Edge-Faur, who served as copy editor, put the paper together and wrote much of its content. Edge-Faur, a 2020 University of Montana graduate from Troy, had worked at the paper for 18 months after stints at the Boulder Monitor and on the advertising design team at the Helena Independent Record.

She’d taken a break from journalism, but had decided to come back and “loved” working at the Leader, she said.

“The local community stuff that isn’t going to be picked up by state or national news outlets was what we focused on,” Edge-Faur said. “And was what made our paper really valuable.”

‘It’s a big hole’

For Anaconda residents who got a fair bit of their news from the Leader, the sudden closure came as a shock.

Dee is the owner of Dee Motors, a family-owned business in Anaconda since 1946. They’ve been advertising with the Leader as long as Robbie Dee can remember, with large Dee Motors branding — and photos of the cars they had around — becoming almost as ubiquitous in the print edition as the paper’s blue logo.

Dee did the company’s advertising work with the Leader, and also submits ads to the Butte paper, the Montana Standard.

Old editions of the paper, going as far back as the 1970s, have Dee advertisements along with many other businesses from Ross to Dale’s Roofing Company. Anaconda had a two-story JCPenney’s for a while, residents point out, and there was plenty to advertise.

But while Dee looks to adjust how he advertises, it’s one thing among many he says are now gone. Obituaries will be missed, he said, sitting in his office flipping through the final edition of the Leader.

“It’s a big hole Anaconda will need filled,” Dee said.

That’s not to mention the editorials, court news, and legal notices, he said.

“That’s where people found out whether or not somebody died and had a will,” Dee said. “Where do people go to find that?”

Dee and others say Anaconda is a place where there is plenty of news to cover and the town is steeped in Montana’s history, starting with the community’s inception as a company town in 1883. It was, for decades, the heart of the state’s resource extraction economy and its famous stack is one of the tallest free-standing brick structures in the world.

Anaconda’s population has fluctuated with the times, and during the slowdown of mining and closure of area industrial operations in the 1970s and 1980s, people left. But the population of Anaconda-Deer Lodge County is on the upswing, nearing 10,000 people after losing large swaths of its population since 1980, when about 13,000 people lived in the area.

It is something of a tourist stop, and a 1979 edition of the paper says it’s “Serving the Friendliest City Under the Big Sky” at the top of its masthead. Cultures from all over the world ended up in Anaconda for early mining and smelting opportunities, including Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, Finns, and Swedes. Anaconda, until the smelter closures of the 1980s, also had a large African-American population dating back to at least the 1880s, and the Leader routinely covered the town’s history in a contemporary manner.

The city has a well-maintained downtown around its historic Main and Park streets, with shops, breweries and even Crossfit and climbing gyms. Anaconda has a stunning Post Office and, like many Montana turn-of-the century industry towns, artfully constructed its buildings. The historic Washoe Theatre, the nearby Hearst Free Library and an imposing county courthouse complete with a dome help round out its greater downtown area.

Tourism was down last year, some locals have said, which is a worry, but Community Hospital in Anaconda is regarded highly. It’s also a Critical Access Hospital, a federal designation allowing it to access certain rural healthcare funding.

There are problems, of course — grass now covers the slag piles from years of mining and smelting operations — but contamination and continued remediation from industrial operations are not issues ending anytime soon. And, like many communities which have had to look elsewhere after heavy, polluting industry leaves, it continues to adjust its economy.

For example, Anaconda is looked at, by some at least, as a gateway to the outdoors, with Georgetown Lake and Pintler Mountains within easy driving distance.

“It’s devastating for a local community, especially one like Anaconda that’s kind of turning the corner and rebuilding for the first time since the smelter closed,” said Blake Hempstead, a former school board member, longtime radio voice of local high school sports, and former journalist for both the Standard and the Leader. “It really is a huge, huge loss to the community.”

‘All their information through the Leader’

Erik Swanson, principal of Anaconda Junior-Senior High School, said the paper’s closure will also impact the schools. 

The Leader constantly included photos of school events, announcements and you can even find weekly lunch menus in editions of the paper.

“In every edition, there was something about the school that highlighted something about our district, our schools, our sports,” Swanson said. “They covered our school board meetings. A lot of people got their information about district initiatives, things that were discussed at school board meetings, in the Leader.”

That includes prep sports and activities. The school’s competitive teams, named the Copperheads, have long been a point of pride in Anaconda, embraced by businesses throughout the year.

This is a place where games against neighboring schools Deer Lodge and Butte Central matter, and Mitchell Stadium, a cavernous facility by peer high school standards, holds significance in town lore, dating back to the Works Project Administration.

Several locals pointed to the fact a significant number of people in the community did, indeed, get the news through a physical paper in their hand and didn’t or couldn’t access the internet.

Swanson said the coverage the Leader gave Anaconda sports isn’t coming from anywhere else.

“The Standard doesn’t cover our athletics, so for community members that can’t attend, they got all their information through the Leader,” Swanson said.

The Leader dedicated pages and pages of stories to high school sports in all Leader eras. Notices for summer camps, special events and even adult sport league scores are scattered across its pages.

“State track meet: Anderson takes second in boys’ triple jump; AHS team finishes third in boys’ 4x100m relay; Evans places third in girls’ discus,” the final sports headline on the Leader’s site reads.

‘A grain of salt’

There is a concern among some in Anaconda that the news desert will be filled with unverified news from Facebook or other social media platforms.

It’s a concern Hempstead also raised in the aftermath of a shooting in an Anaconda bar last year, where some Facebook commenters were posting unverified information about the suspect and law enforcement personnel movement.

It got to the point where Deer Lodge County Attorney Morgan Smith made note of it in a media presser in the middle of the manhunt.

“We ask that you take information that you see on social media with a grain of salt,” Smith said in August last year.

Law enforcement was tight-lipped on the manhunt for Michael Brown, and in the aftermath, sealed records. It wasn’t until this year that media organizations, after legal action, received some access to court records. Locals still have questions about the quadruple murder and interest in what information further court records will reveal, work that many times would fall on a local news organization to do.

“Rumor tends to turn into fact in a lot of these situations,” said Hempstead, who has consistently expressed frustration with social media amplifying unverified news in or about the community.

Swanson said he was a little worried about it, too.

“It’s definitely a concern, especially Anaconda, one person says one thing and it can be misconstrued in so many ways,” Swanson said.

The Leader was also a critical source of information during the pandemic, said Community Hospital CEO Meg Hickey-Boynton.

“During COVID, you know, we were all trying to get out accurate information, and the Leader was vital in that quest to help inform our community was going on with respect to the virus and how they could best protect themselves,” Hickey-Boynton said, adding the company also printed the hospital’s appointment cards, letterhead and marketing materials.

Edge-Faur pointed to a misinformation maze she witnessed in her community last summer when a local city-county task force was examining some rulemaking about domesticated animals, dating back almost four decades.

Edge-Faur had been covering the issue and said the meetings were a relatively quiet for months, until someone online found an old draft of the rules and started posting online about it.

The task force, who Edge-Faur said were, “smart, normal people,” had already redlined some parts of the draft many of the comments were about.

TV news stations picked up on social media posts, with KXLF calling it a “social media frenzy.” The next meeting of the task force was packed with 100 people, Edge-Faur said.

“It just got super blown out of proportion, because people were posting on Facebook and sharing these petitions, and all of this stuff,” she said, adding, “They were so angry, and then when the task force said, ‘No, we’re not doing that, we promise,’ no one cared again.”

‘Something that will last’

Deep in the bowels of the Hearst Free Library are copies of old Anaconda newspapers, including nearly all the copies of the Leader.

Sam Walters, the dedicated director of the library, has slowly been cleaning out the basement of the library over the decade he’s been there. The collection of newspapers the library has is important and he keeps a careful eye on the physical copies. Old newspapers can also be found online at the Montana Historical Society’s website.

One of the caretakers of important parts of Anaconda’s history, Walters is a busy man. On any given day, he might be checking out old newspapers to a reporter, keeping an eye on kids playing Roblox on the library computers, making copies (it’s a paid service the library offers) or explaining to tourists who browsed into the public library on a whim.

“It’s a huge loss,” Walters said, adding that, “the Leader provided reliable news, advertised events … all we can do is hope the Montana Standard will keep printing.”

The library keeps the newspapers in specially-treated boxes to help prevent them from rotting. They’re expensive, it takes time — many papers still need to be flattened, he added — but it is the town’s history in paper form.

Rosein, the former Leader editor, said he’s been meeting with stakeholders in the community, as well as some of the paper’s longtime readers and supporters to “work out a way” forward, he said. Whatever comes next won’t be attached to the former Leader he said, but would look to continue journalism in the community.

“The only similarity is that it would be community journalism, and it would be me doing it, and whomever I am able to eventually bring on board as well,” Rosein said.

Edge-Faur said she would like to stick around and continue doing journalism in the area if possible, too. Rosein said he’s exploring possible business models, but whatever comes next has to be sustainable.

“It has to be something that will last,” Rosein said. “So that this never happens again.”

Editor’s note: The author of this piece is a former Lee Enterprises employee.