The Yellowstone County News is celebrating its 50th year and was first published in October of 1977.
The owner says the key is staying what he calls hyper-local, and he says weekly papers are the heartbeat of the community.
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Yellowstone County News owner and publisher Jonathan McNiven looked at the front page picture for the Thursday paper.
On Wednesday he took the picture to commemorate the milestone.
“Fifty years. We're pretty excited,” McNiven said. “And we're just grateful for the community for coming out.”
McNiven points to the reason he sees for the paper existing and excelling for decades.
“We're hyperlocal,” McNiven said. “We're talking about the individuals. We're talking about the families. We're talking about the community. We’re talking about the local events that are going on.”
Local coverage has been key to the newspaper's success.
“It speaks to the role of local journalism,” said Lee Banville, University of Montana school of journalism director. “There's a lot of turmoil in the newspaper industry, but people still want to know what's going on in their community.”
Banville says newspapers that are owned by out-of-state chains may not have that same local connection.
And he says weeklies such as Yellowstone County News are critical for oversight.
“The weeklies are really oftentimes the front lines of protecting access to information and ensuring that the government's behaving itself,” Banville said.
“We had a freedom of information,” said Becky Robison, former owner of Yellowstone County News. “The doors should be open. The documents should be available and we insisted on it.”
Robison and her husband owned the paper for more than 20 years, and she has known McNiven since at least 1994.
“I was a Boy Scout at the time playing Taps,” McNiven said, pointing to a picture from the June 3, 1994, edition of the Yellowstone County News.
The picture of McNiven as a Boy Scout is the first shot by Robison shot for the paper.
“How would it be that, you know, many years later he would buy it? ” Robison said.
Robison and her husband sold Yellowstone County News to McNiven in 2014.
In the mid 1990s, she hired Evelyn Pyburn, who's been at Yellowstone County News for about 30 years and understands its focus.
“These kinds of newspapers are meant and were always meant to be local news,” Pyburn said.
“I think it's important to all of us,” said Susan Johnson, who has read the paper since the 1990’s. “Sometimes that's the only way we know what's going on. ”
And while McNiven has added live sports on radio and other technology, the focus has remained the same since 1977.
“The weeklies, they're the heartbeats of the community,” McNiven said.
