The editor of the Eureka Springs Independent said she’s buying the weekly newspaper.
Mary Pat Boian said Tuesday that the deal should be wrapped up in a couple of days. Boian wouldn’t disclose the selling price.
Boian said she made the decision after the newspaper’s publisher, Sandra Sewell Templeton, announced that she was going to shut down the Independent “effective immediately.”
Boian said the news came as a surprise when she heard it from Templeton on Thursday.
Templeton told the newspaper’s staff about the impending closure Friday. The Independent has four fulltime and six part-time employees.
Templeton said the Independent has yet to make a profit, but that’s normally not expected for a couple of years. The first issue of the Independent was published on July 5, so the newspaper isn’t a year old yet.
“It really wasn’t a matter of the profits,” Templeton said Tuesday. “It was a matter of our involvement and time. It was a lot of work, and we needed to re-retire. I’m 63. I’m glad we were able to help get it started, but it was time for us to back off and have a little time for ourselves.”
Boian said it’s important for this tourist town to have two weekly newspapers. The other newspaper, the Lovely County Citizen, is published by Rust Communications of Cape Girardeau, Mo.
Templeton said she’s “thrilled” that Boian will continue publishing the Independent.
“She is one of the most dedicated people I’ve ever known,” Templeton said. “Every one of those people over there are that way. They love what they’re doing. Their heart and soul is in it.”
When the Independent will be able to turn a profit is hard to predict, Templeton said.
“That’s a guessing game,” she said. “I’m not going to go there.”
Boian said the first month of profitability could come around the Independent’s first birthday.
Boian said she’ll cut some printing costs and forgo her salary for a while to help the Independent reach that goal.
“I’ll give up a salary for as long as I can to see how it goes,” she said.
There will be no layoffs at the paper, Boian added.
Boian said she decided to buy the newspaper rather than see it shut down.
“It’s just fair,” she said. “There’s no way I couldn’t have done this. It’s not stressful. I’m not sleepless. … I just think we have the community support, not to be all Pollyanna. We can be austere if we have to.”
Boian said she has no investors backing her purchase of the Independent.
The Independent was established to compete directly with the Citizen, which Boian co-founded in 1999 and sold to Rust in 2005. The Citizen was started to compete with Rust’s Eureka Springs Times-Echo, which later became part of that newspaper chain’s Carroll County News of Berryville.
Boian left the Citizen in in 2005 but was hired in 2010 as its editor. She left that job last year to be founding editor of the Independent.
Each paper prints about 6,500 copies per week, which are distributed for free, according to Boian and Kristal Kuykendall, editor of the Citizen. Each paper is also available on the Internet.
Editors of the two newspapers said each averages about 36 pages per issue.
Aggressive newspaper coverage is expected in Eureka Springs, a city of 2,073 people known for its combative politics and eccentric personalities.
Boian said she doesn’t think of the Citizen as competition, but she does look through each issue of the Citizen counting advertisements and stories.
Templeton said she would call it a competition but not a “newspaper war.”
“We weren’t in a war,” she said. “We were just producing a paper.”
Templeton said she believes there’s room for two weekly newspapers in Eureka Springs.
“Everybody’s got to find their niche,” she said. “I think we found our niche. It was more of an alternative newspaper.”
Alternative newspapers have a strong focus on local news, culture and the arts, according to the Association of Alternative Newsmedia.Alternative newspapers also have “an informal and sometimes profane style” with an emphasis on point-of-view reporting and narrative journalism, according to the organization’s website, altweeklies.com.
Boian said some advertisers left the Independent for the Citizen last week after rumors circulated that the Independent was going to close.
“It’s going to be a battle for advertisers now, but I’m confident in what we’re putting out there,” said Boian. “We’ll see what happens now that everybody thinks we’re shut down. So it’s going to be uphill now.”
Boian emphasizes the locally owned aspect of the Citizen.
“Everybody in town has my cell phone number, and they can call me at any time,” she said. “And it’s OK because they’re friends.”
Boian said there’s a “revolutionary thing” about an upstart local paper taking on a chain that owns 50 newspapers, including nine in Arkansas.
“People say it doesn’t make good business sense, but people are attracted to that here,” said Boian. “Nobody seems to have any trepidation about this.”
Boian, 64, said the newspaper business is in her blood. Her parents met while both were working at the Dayton Daily News in Ohio. Her father was a sportswriter and her mother wrote for the society page. Later, her father was in charge of advertising at the Denver Post, and during World War II was a Marine war correspondent for the Daily News while stationed in Okinawa.
Kuykendall, who is managing editor of the Citizen and the Carroll County News, said she had no comment about the sale of the Independent.
Eureka Springs Mayor Morris Pate said he wasn’t particularly concerned about the local newspapers.
“I don’t know that one’s any more liberal than the other or conservative,” he said. “A lot of times I don’t even read them. I don’t know if it would affect us or not.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 05/29/2013