From the Alvin and Rosalie Sara Check studio, PBS Kansas Presents Positively Kansas, It's Time for Positively Kansas.

Coming up, who's watching the people in power?

When the newsroom lights go out, we'll look at the critical struggle to save Kansas newspapers before the final edition is printed and a surprise in the making.

We're heading into the woods to witness the romance of autumn that results in new life each spring.

I'm Ciara Scott.

Join us for a half hour of information and inspiration on this edition of Positively Kansas.

And.

Be.

Across America, thousands of local newspapers have disappeared over the past two decades, taking with them watchdog reporting, community voices, and a shared civic memory.

Kansas has not been immune.

From small town weeklies to the state's largest metro, daily newsrooms are shrinking, merging and in some cases, vanishing altogether.

Chris Frank takes us inside four very different Kansas newsrooms to examine the struggle that exists for the future of our communities, from small town weeklies to one of Kansas City's most historic daily newspapers.

We're spending time inside for very different newsrooms.

Some are more than 150 years old.

One barely a decade into its life.

Together, they reveal what's happening to local journalism in Kansas and why it matters.

The newspaper, is not the widespread sort of mass consumed product it used to be.

David Seaton is a fourth generation Kansas newspaper publisher.

He walks the hallway.

Publishers before him have walked for decades, from the newsroom to what used to be the heart of the operation.

Our old gas community seven unit press that we don't use anymore.

Once this press thundered day and night printing thousands of newspapers for Cowley County, today it sits in silence.

Yes, we've still got the paper rolls on it from the last day that we use it.

And some of the units have plates on them from, you know, the metal plates that make the impression on the paper from the last day that we used it.

Yeah.

The Cowley Courier traveler is now printed more than 40 miles away in Ponca City, Oklahoma.

This empty press room, a symbol of how newspapers across Kansas and America have changed.

This is the folder unit.

And, where the papers, came in, folded together, and they came out here and then were cut and came out on the conveyor and spilled out on here into this conveyor for the mail room to get them, stack them, label them, bag them.

14 miles north, another printing press sits idle inside the former Winfield Courier News office for more than 150 years.

Both Cowley County cities supported it.

Independent newspapers.

You know, the turn of the last century, there were multiple newspapers in each town.

Those included the Winfield Tribune and the Kansas City Daily News.

But the Winfield Courier and our Kansas City traveler were the survivors, and they were kind of bitter rivals for a long time.

Right, because in the same county and they competed for stories, they both covered the county commission and county issues.

The Kansas City Traveler started in the same year.

The city was settled in 1870.

The Winfield Courier founded in 1874.

The once rivals merged in 2016.

Out of necessity, Seaton says, but survival of such mergers are being challenged by the decline in readership.

It's just the way of the world that technology has reshaped how we kind of operate and function in society, and certainly our relationship to information consumption.

This newsroom was once busy with reporters and advertising reps working to meet deadlines, and the news area was over here.

More desks now sit empty than occupied.

How many people worked in there?

Well, all these desks were filled.

John Shulman has filled a desk here as a reporter and columnist for ten years.

Shulman says some of the societal shifts concern him, and in some of the younger people, don't even look at the news at all.

You know, and, that that's, you know, makes me wonder, you know, what?

What's going to be the generation coming up if if they're not interested in following the news?

It was once common to see people at cafes reading newspapers.

Now they read from their smartphones.

And once those once these little papers go out of the town, they never get them back again.

A Kansas University report estimates there were between 600 and 700 active publications in the state in the 1920s.

As of 2026, Kansas has about 151 newspapers, according to the Middle School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

That's a 75 to 80% decline from a century ago.

The Kansas Press Association says a century ago, nearly every paper was independently or family owned.

Now there are only about 86 unique owners statewide.

Local ownership, in my opinion, is so important, to a newspaper.

You know, it's hard to know how to, It's hard to know how to cover a community if you're never there, citizen.

Well, my deadline to have everything in the paper is noon on Wednesday.

Meredith Ralph O'Dell is editor of the Wilson County Citizen in Fredonia.

It's a weekly newspaper.

She is the youngest member of the royal family, which has owned the paper since 1961.

It's a big machine that requires precision.

Meredith's sister, Virginia Ralph, referring to the large printing press no longer in service.

The Wilson County Citizen also printed in Ponca City now.

Okay, that sounds great.

Thanks.

Bye bye.

O'Dell is busy getting the next edition of The Citizen ready for print.

Fredonia with 2071 residents and Wilson County at 8400 are both declining, leaving fewer potential newspaper customers.

I think with a small town, you know, nobody else is going to do your high school sports or Fccla or, you know, things like that.

Your Girl Scout stuff.

You're not going to find that in a big paper.

Customers say they depend on the citizen for local news.

I think is very important, as you can see, as I like to get it.

And I just, Yeah.

We just.

But, you know, newspapers are going away, and I am bad because I can't get it.

Wichita won't send me one.

Kansas City won't send me one.

And I am right.

I get one from here.

And anyway, we're just thrilled.

O'Dell says she often finds herself in the role of finding answers for local citizens.

People come in and ask, you know, how come this is this way?

Well, I don't know, but I'll ask.

I have no problem.

I you know, I'm not intimidated by anybody.

She's concerned about who will report on local government if local newspapers go away.

Nobody will be there to tell these stories.

To tell, you know, hey, you're, you know, the city did a big sewer project, and your sewer cost is going to triple.

O'Dell says she would like to sell the paper to a community focused buyer, but continue working here.

My dream would be if someone assumed ownership.

I'll take a few, and I could stay on and do what I do.

I would, I'm not in favor of selling to anyone who would shut down the paper.

Northwestern University's Middle School of Journalism and AP news in 2025 reported an accelerating trend of newspaper closures and loss of newspaper jobs.

Since 2005.

The U.S.

has lost nearly 3500 newspapers and over 270,000 newspaper jobs.

It's resulted in news deserts, where more than 213 counties have no news outlets.

The middle school study finds 58 Kansas counties with only one local source for news.

Elk County is listed as having no local source for news.

That doesn't mean populations are unable to get national or state broadcast news, but national networks don't report local news unless it rises to a national level.

The same can be said of Wichita TV stations.

I mean, I personally know the editors of every single one of these papers and have worked with them.

We're all in the same boat, and we're all either going to sink or swim.

And so we we work together.

It's a warm August day, and the Harvey County Now newspaper is celebrating its ten year anniversary.

So the paper invited their customers to celebrate with them in the newsroom, which conveniently in an earlier life, was a bar.

Ten years in Newton has been lovely.

The community has been really, really supportive of us.

The Harvey County Now newspaper in Newton seems to be going against the downward newspaper trend.

Ten years in business is a short time compared to many Kansas newspapers, which are more than a century old.

But this paper is finding ways to grow readership while so many other papers are struggling.

It does take a community to be supportive of the newspaper.

To be successful, I mean, we're certainly not successful without them.

So newspapers are struggling for a number of reasons.

One, once the internet came, the industry was not quick to adapt, and it had a really hard time finding like monetary models that worked.

But Strunk says that's 20 years in the past and says there has been time for newspapers to adjust.

So what you started seeing was, newspapers were weakened by the loss of the classifieds section, loss of all this ad revenue.

It weakened them enough to where you were able to have some of these larger corporate ownerships, these hedge fund companies start purchasing all these publications.

They're trying to turn a profit every quarter.

So the quickest way to turn a profit is you cut staff.

His assessment is backed up by a University of North Carolina study, which says the U.S.

has lost nearly two thirds of its newspaper journalists since 2005, totaling around 43,000 jobs.

Harvey County, now, like most newspapers do, has an online edition, but it also offers a traditional weekly newspaper, which many of his customers still prefer.

I don't read online well, and I like to hold on to the paper and, you know, get my fingers inky.

I just I just love it.

It's it has a little bit of everything.

Her comments reminds me of what I have found in Kansas newspapers of the late 1800s.

Those papers were the social media outlets of their day.

Besides the stories of the day, papers like the Harper Sentinel in 1887 would include such things as W.H.

Munger was taken sick suddenly yesterday at 5:00 and lying quite low all day.

He was better this morning.

Now that's what you can find on today's social media.

The local newspaper keeps me up to date, helps me to understand what's happening in our community, and also the ideas that are coming across from other people about our community.

Localism makes a community newspaper relevant.

I get a lot of questions all the time.

People ask me about what's going on in Washington, D.C.

and my answer is always, well, we don't want a reporter in D.C.. You know, if you want to know about what's going on with the county commission or the city government, like I can tell you what's going on.

That's where we have reporters.

And, we're really, really happy to serve that audience.

And, to do that work.

The paper also works to engage their customers with social options, including an annual blues, brews and barbecue outdoor festival.

Those make money for the paper and makes for a closer connection with their readers.

We really, really built our model, not just around advertising.

We love our advertisers, dearly.

But we really, you know, built a joint joint model with with readers being a big part of that.

Young says reader revenue brings in about 50% of the paper's income a year.

Back in the day, advertising made up most of the most of the revenue.

Most of the income.

And so, like, that model's changed a lot.

Since, you know, post internet.

Historically, newspapers made money off of classified ads.

Now, ask yourself, when was the last time you posted an ad in the classifieds?

People now place personal ads on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.

That's revenue.

Local papers.

Miss.

There used to be three competitors.

You had print.

You had radio and your TV.

Those were the only three people sitting at the advertising pie.

And now there are thousands of people sitting at the advertising pie.

Which is why, and, you know, we, we, we really believe in, engaging with our readers.

Strunk says Harvey County now didn't have instant success.

He says the team struggled in the early years to get traction and attract enough subscribers to become profitable.

Some of those years, like we weren't marketing, some of those years, we were losing money.

Some of those years, maybe an accountant would have told us this isn't a good business decision, but we had skin in the game.

We cared a lot.

We knew we could work our butts off.

And so that's kind of what we did.

The Newton Kansan also serves Harvey County.

It's not common to have two newspapers in the same community any longer.

The Newton cans and publishes three days a week.

It's owned by Cherry Road Media.

But really, like what we did, it's not like it's a magic formula.

We just tried really hard to write news.

People cared about that.

We were able to contextualize and that people were willing to pay for, like the well-run newspapers are in smaller towns and they're owned by people in town.

It's not so much the newspaper industry struggling.

It's changing.

The Harvey County, now founded at a time other papers were greatly shrinking operations or closing entirely and finding a model that so far works for them.

I hope the newspaper sticks around for another ten years and beyond.

Newspapers were considered essential in the state's early history when new towns were established.

One of the first businesses would be a town newspaper.

This town here, or Kansas City when it was founded, had a newspaper right away.

Our Kansas City was founded in 1870.

By the end of that year, the Kansas City Traveler was being published from a wooden shack on Summit Street.

The city's main street in Kansas is early days.

Newspapers weren't just reporting the news.

They were selling the promise of their towns.

Publishers proudly boomed their communities, believing that if the town grew, the paper would grow with it.

Their fortunes rose and fell together.

One of the most civic minded and outspoken of those early boosters was Marshall Murdock, publisher of The Wichita Eagle, whose influence helped shape Wichita's early identity.

One thing this Marshall Murdock really try to do was promote the idea of Wichita and to get it to grow.

And, you know, back in the early days, people talk about bias in journalism today.

You look at those old papers, it was nothing.

But, Marsellus murdock was having editorials written by himself on the front page every day.

Pushing for various things.

Marshall Murdock proclaimed Wichita the peerless princess of the Plains.

And through the eagle's pages, promoted Wichita as the place for pioneers to settle and do business.

In the early days, there were other Wichita papers, including the The Dead, The Republican, The beacon, The Eagle, and beacon remained competitors until 1960, when the Eagle acquired the beacon.

The Eagle prevailed above all others to become the dominant media outlet in Wichita for decades.

At its peak, the Eagle had 735 employees.

In 1980, with a print circulation of around 100,000 daily and Sunday.

Their office building, located at 825 East Douglas, was quite large.

By year 2000, the Eagle had dropped to 450 positions.

Offices moved to smaller locations as the paper downsized.

The Eagle now offices in the Epic Center.

And now they're looking at this.

And so that's where our readership hits.

You know, I tell folks, and I've said it's literally my first day on the job in this position.

We're not a newspaper company.

We're a news company that publishes a newspaper on any given day.

More than 90% of our readership is digital.

In 2026, the Eagle newsroom has 15 employees with one open position.

We'll have someone there or someone there, and then Alison's there.

That doesn't count.

Others who are on McClatchy payroll, the parent company, such as those in advertising executive editor Michael Rothman, oversees what he says is primarily a digital news operation.

We may not have embraced the change as quickly as we should have, but we did embrace change and in this modern world, you have to adapt or die.

Today, opinion editor Diane Lefler is one of the only remaining regular columnists at The Eagle.

That's a sharp contrast to the paper's earlier era of having specialists from fashion to farming.

Aviation to arts and even gardening.

And some things.

There's some things people feel very passionate about and wish we cover.

But the interest just isn't there among enough folks to do that.

Rahman says being digital allows the Eagle to know better what their customers want to read online.

It's technology now.

We know what people are reading.

We know how far into a story somebody reads.

We know what's keeping the retention.

And so we're able to focus on those topics that are either the most important or are the ones that our readers have told us.

This is what we're interested in.

Print journalism has been in decline for decades, and without the same amount of advertising to subsidize print, there is no reason to expect that to change.

Digital subscriptions are where everything happens right now, you know, is not to denigrate our print readers.

Heck, I have a print subscription and as long as some still want print, publishers will provide it.

If the customer is willing to pay a higher price, reflective of what it now costs to print them, the Cowley Courier traveler made a big change in its subscription rate in 2025, double the subscription price of our newspaper in one fell swoop.

Seaton says it was that or keep cutting employees.

He says subscriptions have to cover what advertising dollars used to.

But so far, so good.

You know, we kind of stabilize our revenues.

Seaton shudders to think what could happen in local governments if nobody reports on government happenings locally.

Things are probably happening right now that we don't know.

We may never, even never know, you know.

And that's something the public has to consider.

The Pew Research Center estimates roughly 30,000 newsroom positions were cut between 2008 and 2020, with many more lost since then.

That's pretty darn scary and scary because there are fewer reporters watching where tax dollars are being spent.

No one else does what we do.

And with fewer journalists covering local news, one has to wonder what's being missed and whether the public will ever know it was missed at all.

This is Chris Frank for Positively Kansas.

Nationwide, more than one third of U.S.

counties now have little or no regular local news coverage, meaning fewer journalists in the room when public decisions are made.

Across the Kansas outdoors, spring is a time of new life and new beginnings.

For deer, that new life has its origins in the fall.

Mike Blair brings us these facts of life in this week's Kansas Wild Edge.

It's November and cold has reached the heartland.

Leaves have fallen and geese are flying.

Another morning stirs and whitetail bucks are on the move.

Urgent business waits.

Deer mating season has arrived.

The bucks cruised ridgelines, watching fields below.

Those are there.

Some in timber, some.

And feed.

Some are ready and some are not.

The bucks must find them.

The dogs give several clues when ready to breed.

Much of this has to do with scent.

A dose, individual said, is partly tied to large tarsal glands on the inside of each hind leg.

Normally these glands are white, but disastrous approaches.

The glands turn dark and tarry.

The doe urinates across them and odor is carried to the ground, leaving a scent trail for Buck's to follow.

The doe, also to certain twigs of trees, often prey marked by bucks, is a sort of community scent forum.

This also helps define her readiness.

And finally, an estrus doe often shows visual clues evident at the distance.

When she walks with her tail held at half mast.

She also makes a particular show of urination.

And every buck in sight will run the scent.

Check her condition.

The buck curls his lip and uses a special nasal organ to analyze the scent.

If it's promising, the buck gives chase.

Often this becomes a game of hide and seek.

But the buck eventually tracks her down.

Then he moves carefully to avoid pushing her away.

The buck stays nearby for hours while the doe feet bends and becomes fully receptive.

He may stand and guard her, or he may bend down close by.

But he's always ready to drive away.

Rival bucks that may appear.

After mating, the buck resumes his search for other doe's.

This lasts ended December and even January.

Big bucks.

Normally shy and elusive, are now active and more visible than at any other time.

Be watching.

Get in on one of nature's finest wildlife shows.

I'm Mike Blair for Positively Kansas.

Well, that's a wrap for this week.

With federal funding eliminated, the future of Positively Kansas is now in your hands.

You can help by going to npr.org and making a $100 donation directly to this program to keep us on the air as a thank you.

We'll proudly feature your name as a supporter at the beginning and end of future episodes.

I host the show for free because our local stories like these deserve to be told.

Thanks for watching.

I'm Ciara Scott.

See you next time.