In November, the Reno News & Review celebrated its 32nd birthday. In the entirety of those 32 years, I am not sure there’s ever been a moment when the RN&R wasn’t struggling, to at least some degree.
The paper was founded as Nevada Weekly, and after a year and a half, the publication was insolvent. The owners of the News & Review newspapers in Sacramento and Reno came to town and saved the publication.
I was a summer intern for the RN&R in 1996, a temp employee in 1997, the news editor in 1999-2000, and the editor in 2000-2001—and for that entire time, we were told the financial picture was less than stellar. I kept in touch with the editors and publishers in the years that followed, and whenever I’d ask how the publication was doing, the best answer I ever got was “Eh, OK.”
I know that the staffers toiling here as the calendar flipped from 2019 to 2020 felt overworked and underpaid (as most journalists do)—and then came March 2020, when the pandemic shutdowns led the RN&R’s owners to lay off the entire staff and shutter the paper. After a few weeks, the RN&R resumed very limited publishing online.
In retrospect, that death of the weekly print publication, and the near-complete death of the RN&R, may have ultimately saved the RN&R.
Frank X. Mullen, a Nevada Newspaper Hall of Famer, stepped in and started writing for the online publication; the owners were smart enough to cajole him into becoming the RN&R’s editor. However, while some readers stepped in and started financially supporting the RN&R—thank you so much for that—the publication had no digital revenue plan. Heck, even though Frank was doing amazing, award-winning work, a significant number of people didn’t even know the RN&R was still publishing online.
Around Thanksgiving of 2021, I received a call from the RN&R’s owners. I’d reached out earlier in 2021 and offered them help, since as I had experience running a primarily digital publication; that led to brief and ultimately fruitless discussions about me purchasing the RN&R. Now, they were calling to again ask if I was interested in taking it over—because there was a good chance it would shutter entirely if I didn’t. At the time, the RN&R had one paying advertiser. One.
At the end of January 2022, my company became owner of the RN&R. We set to work with two primary goals: First, to rebuild the RN&R’s digital presence and develop a digital revenue model; and second, to return to print as a monthly, since most readers and advertisers had always viewed us as a print publication, and little else.
I am relieved to say we succeeded. We rebuilt our website using Newspack, a top-of-the line publishing platform for small newspaper publishers. We also invested in a top-notch digital advertising system, and signed up with BlueLena, a digital marketing/newsletter/technology company. We used grant funds administered by AAN Publishers and the Local Independent Online News publishers to bolster this “tech stack” and to beef up our digital offerings; for example, we launched our 11 Days a Week events newsletter.
On the print side, we succeeded in re-launching as a monthly, with our June 2022 comeback issue hitting streets over Memorial Day weekend. Three months later, we brought back our Best of Northern Nevada issue. While we were back in print, we always made sure we were promoting our website and our digital offerings to both advertisers/potential advertisers and readers—because we knew that our regular print edition could not last forever, even as a monthly.
To be blunt: Print is hard to do—and with the last commercial printer in the area closing in early 2022, that made print even more of a challenge. It costs a lot of time and money to design, paginate, proof, print, ship and distribute a newspaper, and none of that time and money has anything to do with reporting and writing the news.
Today, we are at the point where regular monthly print editions are no longer economically feasible, and you’re holding in your hands the last regular print edition of the RN&R. As I mentioned last month, we’ll be back in print for Best of Northern Nevada, and maybe for a special edition here and there, but as for regular editions—unless someone steps up and writes us a very big check to subsidize things—this is it. I wish we could have kept going in print for longer, but we couldn’t.
But because of our success in rebuilding and bolstering our digital side, we’re ready to continue on and succeed as a (mostly) online-only publication. If the pandemic closures hadn’t happened, and the RN&R had kept struggling along as a weekly print publication with no significant digital side, I am not sure it would have survived the closure of the last local printer in February 2022.
But we’re still here, now in our 33rd year. Yes, just as we always have, we’re struggling a bit—but now we can focus our attention on news, arts, food and music coverage, without worrying about producing and distributing the dead-tree edition. That gives me hope that the best and brightest days for the RN&R may actually be ahead of us.
Go to RenoNR.com, please. Bookmark the page. Sign up for our newsletters—and join us as we continue covering Reno, Sparks, Carson City and beyond for many years to come.