(bright music) - Will you consider this?

You know, we gotta reach out and touch back with our roots and everything and try to find out how things got named and how things got started and we don't wanna forget anything.

But this young man, Josiah Chatterton, is the owner and publisher?

- Yes.

- Of "The Forgottonia News."

Now, that's an interesting story in itself.

First we're gonna find out about Josiah.

So tell me a little bit about you.

Where'd you come from?

Forgottonia.

- Yes, I was born in Forgottonia in Fulton.

Well, I was actually born in Galesburg, the hospital, but raised outside of Ellisville in Fulton County.

It's where I grew up my whole life.

I grew up with seven siblings, large family.

We were homeschooled.

And I ended up going to high school at Bushnell.

I was one of the, I was the first kid in my family to decide to do that.

My mom left it open to us.

And I had all girls around me, 'cause there's three boys and five girls and I was in the middle of all the girls.

I couldn't stand 'em.

So I went to public school- - You needed to break out.

Okay.

- To go and see somebody else other than just my sisters.

(Christine laughs) My mom was happy with that 'cause I was pretty good at annoying them too.

- Oh, well, go figure.

All right.

When you're a middle child, I guess that happens.

- Yes.

- Okay.

- So I ended up going to Bushnell and I enjoyed public school.

I participated in a lot of things.

FFA, chorus.

And then I decided to go to Western to major in music education.

- Right, and you said that your mother was musically talented?

- Yes.

She was a band teacher.

And my father was also very talented musically.

We have a family farm, but he to this day still plays in bands regularly.

He will sing in choirs from time to time.

He leads worship at their home church and he's a wonderful musician.

- Awesome.

- So I went to Western and went there for music education and obviously that's not where I've gone with my life, but.

- No, exactly.

So, okay, so let's define Forgottonia.

It's 16 counties if I'm correct.

- Yes.

- Okay.

- Yes.

So my knowledge on the history is not perfect.

There are a lot of people that are older than me that have better knowledge of it.

But my understanding is that it was 16 counties and back to what I've understood to be the history is that it gained a lot of traction in the 1980s when a fellow named Neil Gamm, I've heard decided to do it as a senior project at Western.

And he wanted to secede these 16 counties from the state of Illinois because he was unhappy with the, basically what they were getting back from Illinois with their tax dollars.

- So they're basically Central Illinois at the bump that goes to the Mississippi River.

- Yeah, it, like, cut off a straight line so the western border of Illinois would've been a lot more straight.

So he wanted to secede from the state of Illinois.

And I've heard that the crazy plan was to immediately declare war on Iowa (Christine laughs) and then declare peace also pretty much immediately so that then they could apply to Illinois for foreign aid so they get their tax dollars back.

- Well.

- Quite the plan.

That's not our ambitions with the paper, just to be clear, but.

- Okay, all right.

So, okay, so now you have started a paper.

You're the owner.

- Yes.

- At age 24, this is really quite an undertaking, and you have a very small staff, but mostly you're serving four counties.

So 1/4 of the Forgottonia area.

So, and some of it that I recall about Forgottonia is that at one point, well, the Chicago to Kansas City throughway, what they were trying to get, and to go through those counties because it's really kind of a direct route if you think about it.

- Yes.

- And so politically it just didn't work out.

There was all kinds of different kind of maneuvering, and, really, are there many four-lane roads in any of those 16 counties?

- Not a whole lot.

We have Highway 67 and then I think it's 74 that runs through Galesburg.

It gets through Knox County there on the northeastern portion.

But no, especially, Knox is a little bit more developed compared to the other three, but Warren, McDonough, and Fulton County are very, very rural.

It is the epitome of small-town America.

- So those are the four counties that you concentrate on?

- Yes, Knox, - So, Knox- - [Josiah] Warren, Fulton, and McDonough County.

- All right.

Okay.

What big cities are in those?

I know Monmouth is in Warren County.

- Warren, then Galesburg.

- Yes, yes.

- McComb.

- Right.

- And Canton are the four largest.

Lewiston's also notable.

It's the county seat- - In Fulton.

- In Fulton.

But Canton's a little bit larger than Lewiston.

- All right, so you decided that, "We're being forgotten and there's things that people need to know."

- Yes.

- So you started this newspaper called "The Forgottonia News."

- We did.

"Forgottonia Times."

- Or, excuse me, "Forgottonia Times."

- But Forgottonia News is a portion on the website, yeah, so, it works still.

- All right.

Okay.

All right, so tell me about that, what you do and how many you have in your staff and how you get your stuff.

- Yeah, so we decided to start because I had a very small background in news, but not actually in the production of news.

I was working with computers developing tools for writers.

- [Christine] Okay.

- So I didn't really initially have any ambition to get into news.

In fact, nobody on our staff really saw it coming.

- [Christine] Oh, okay (chuckles).

- I was working for a large company that, I was doing remote work for them and I was initially in computers.

I'd had (indistinct)- - Well, and that was also during the pandemic too.

- Yes.

Yep.

- All right.

- And so I was working with them and then I ended up getting moved into a management position where I got to see what was happening to these small newspapers that they would acquire.

And after they'd acquired them, the staff would get removed a lot of times or severely lowered.

- And they'd pull stuff off the internet.

- They'd pull stuff off of the internet and it'd be a lot of remote writers.

And I just didn't, I didn't like seeing that.

It was pretty disappointing for me, and as a younger individual, it was the first time I paid attention to newspapers.

- All right.

Well, 'cause there weren't, you're 24 years old, there weren't very many, there aren't very many newspapers around anymore.

- Yes.

When I was in high school, the only time I can remember seeing a newspaper is I won an award in FFA one time at my high school and my mom showed it to me because I'd made the paper.

But that was the only time I can remember ever seeing a newspaper growing up.

- [Christine] Whoa, interesting.

(chuckles) That's really crazy.

- So that's why we decided to start.

It was really just, I was unhappy with my position that I had at the time.

- With this big company.

Right.

- My wife was working at a bank.

She was not enjoying being a teller.

It was a wonderful bank to work for, but she didn't like sitting and just being at a desk all day.

So we decided to go out on this adventure, and we have four people on our staff right now.

We have myself.

I do some writing, all the editing, and some of the layout and graphic design.

We have my wife Hannah, who she does all of the reporting and she writes a lot of the material as well.

Most of our specialty interviews, she is the one that's responsible for going out and finding those people and getting in contact with them.

- [Christine] All right.

- We have Josh Lockhart, who is our sales manager and he does a wonderful job for us.

And then we have a part-time, Matt Rauschert is his name and he works full-time for a engineering firm at Bushnell actually of all places.

So he's good with design and he was initially the one that helped us get the layout for the paper 'cause he's very proficient in Adobe.

So I learned how to do a lot of that stuff from him and he's been a huge blessing, but he only works with us probably 10 hours a month.

- So is this a monthly?

- It is.

- All right.

- So we send it out on a monthly basis.

We do have a, it goes out on the first Friday, and then on the third Friday of each month, we have a subscriber edition that we send out electronically right now and we'd like to print it in the future if the finances work out for that.

- Right, well, sales and subscriptions.

So for online, you do it by subscription.

- Yes.

We, at the beginning, started offering subscriptions for people.

Initially it didn't come with anything except for a newsletter which was very intermittent and we just had people that wanted to support us.

So we sent them, we had like some bumper stickers printed with our logo on it and we sent them those.

We had local discounts to, like, a winery in our area that we'd send them as part of their subscription.

But it was mostly just a donation to the company to help support us.

- So you send out how many papers once a month?

- Right now, we saturation mail just over 56,000 copies every month.

- Really?

Well, so that's not, it doesn't seem that rural.

That's a lot of people for- - It is a lot of people, yeah.

- For four counties.

- Yeah, so it's 56, it's every residential address in the four counties that we serve.

- And this is, they don't have subscriptions.

This is a freebie or?

- That's the freebie.

That was initially what we started with.

The subscription edition has come online regularly, I think our first one we sent out was actually in November.

So we are- - 'Cause you just started in- - Yeah, we're seven months old.

- All right.

- So we've offered the subscription edition for three months of those seven.

So we saturation mailed the thing.

We are really wanting it to work.

Part of our ethos with the paper is that we saw, so the oldest of our staff is 25 and the youngest is 23 and there's four of us.

- Okay (chuckles).

But that's so awesome that your generation is embracing this right now because you can see that, you know, getting things online, it's not always as accurate as you want it to be.

And it's certainly not including any of your 16, of the four counties that you're covering.

- Right.

From a younger generation's perspective, we saw a lot of our graduating classes in high school decide to move away, move out of the state.

A lot of them had the opinion that this area sucked.

They didn't like it.

- Right, it was forgotten.

- Yeah, they thought there's more opportunity outside of here, whether it's in Peoria or Springfield or Bloomington or in another state.

Most of them left.

I can think of like maybe five people from my graduating class that I know are still doing things in our area.

- Still here.

So you're the one who gets to plan the reunions.

- Yeah, apparently.

- Other than that, but go ahead.

(chuckles) - So we wanted to try and change that, which that's a pretty big task.

And then we also saw that if you try to log on to any news source online, a lot of times, especially for our area, it's not going to be local.

It's usually about something far away.

- [Christine] Right.

- When we first started, I went and picked up a copy of all the newspapers that still existed in our area and one of them was the "McDonough County Voice" and the front page story for that paper was how Tatum had performed on the Boston Celtics the week prior and- - [Christine] The week prior.

(Christine chuckles) - Yeah.

I'm not a basketball fan, so I don't know for sure, but I was struggling to see how that pertained to McDonough County, Illinois.

- Mm-hm.

I'm with you on that one.

(chuckles) - Our big ethos with this, our big goal, is we wanna start offering news to small-town America that is traditionally underserved, that's in a news desert, and we want to offer news that is not sensational.

Our generation has seen, since the beginning, only news that is sensationalized through social media.

And, you know, that's not to say that social media is the start of that.

Obviously with newspapers back in the 1800s- - [Christine] It's where it evolved.

- It's always been there.

- Right.

- But we want to try and offer an alternative to that with our paper.

So anything that gets into our paper, it is local.

It is not outside of our four counties.

It is educational, informative, or upbeat.

And we want it to all be something that people want to read.

We're not doing hit pieces.

We're not doing opinion pieces.

We're not going and, you know, harping on somebody because of something they said at a village hall meeting and we're just not- - Are you reporting on village hall meeting?

- Looking for that.

- Are you doing that kind of thing too?

Or where are you getting your stories and story ideas and?

- Okay.

So we don't do any in-person reporting on village hall meetings because it would be pretty taxing for our team to go around to the many communities.

- [Christine] With there's six of you total, is that what you said?

- Four.

- Four, four.

- And there's only two that are producing news, my wife and myself.

- All right, okay.

And you need to keep your marriage together.

- We do, yes.

- All right, all right.

That's a priority.

- That is priority number one.

- Okay.

Good.

- So a lot of the stories that we report are important events coming up that we think should be shared, that people should see, or something special that happened.

- [Christine] Are you getting news releases?

- We get a lot of PRs from cities and organizations in the area.

Our best stories come from contacts that we have in communities that tell us about something special that happened, or individuals that lead organizations that know about important things happening there.

One story that's coming up in our edition is about a boy scout troop in Macomb that did a project for a, Industry is a tiny community outside of Macomb and they redid all the park benches as just a project of theirs.

- And it wasn't even an Eagle Scout project?

- It was an Eagle Scout project I think.

So it was just- - But the troop got involved too.

- Yes.

But we would not, I would've never heard that if I wasn't involved in reporting and I would never pick up a newspaper or consume local media as a 24-year-old in this area if I hadn't had realized that through my job.

So that's why we're saturation mailing is we want to- - Open people's eyes up.

- Yes.

I know that the next 24-year-old the door over is not going to buy our newspaper, but if it goes to them for free, we found that they are picking it up and reading it just a little bit.

- [Christine] Mm-hm.

- We're proud of that.

- Well, there's also advertising in there, right?

- Yes, mm-hm.

- And if those businesses are getting business as a result of them reading the paper, it's just the way the cookie crumbles.

- Yeah, yeah, we were very happy.

We had an advertiser run a hiring ad and they put a QR code for an application in there, which we were happy to see because it was gonna be a very concrete, you know, one-to-one ratio of how that advertisement performed.

And they ended up having almost 150 people apply from that.

- Really?

- And they had I think 22 or 24 of them show up to the interview that they scheduled after that.

So we were really happy to see that.

And they paid $750 for that ad.

- And that was just a one-month thing or?

- That's a one month thing, yep.

They got that off of one month.

- Well, that helped.

- Yes, yeah.

- That definitely helped.

- So they've come back to advertise with us and we've seen a great response from the ads.

I think the hardest thing has been convincing people that we're actually sending out as many as we are.

- Well, and that you're legit.

- Yeah.

- So you are really, your learning curve has been (whistles) way up there.

- Yes.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- [Christine] What did your wife Hannah major in?

- She majored in archeology at Knox College.

- [Christine] Uh-huh.

- And sociology as well I think.

She's always had an interest in stories.

- [Christine] All right.

- So she was never trained as a writer but she was looking at history.

So it's not that much different from what we're doing now.

- Well, it is- - It may not be quite as old as she was looking at initially.

- His story, yeah, exactly.

Or her story.

- Right.

- Well, just really fascinating.

So are you having fun doing this?

I mean, it's taxing, but are you having fun?

- Yes.

We actually just had that conversation with my wife a couple days ago, 'cause it's been pretty stressful.

We just received our first paycheck in January.

We've been living off of savings since then, trying to keep the thing going, and we sat down and looked at each other and I was like, we'd just got done with a very long day of work, we'd been in there for quite a while, and I was like, "Well, if you had the option right now, would you go back to the bank?"

And she was like, "No."

When we sat down on this, it was pretty nerve-wracking.

But I knew that the worst-case scenario was that we would've tried something and we'd be back to a nine-to-five job, so.

- Well, that's a good attitude to have.

Just push forward and keep onward.

So what's been the most difficult thing for you other than living without a paycheck for seven months, six months maybe?

- We just got our first one this month.

- There you go.

That's wonderful.

You can check that box.

- It's pretty cool, yeah.

- And then so where do you have the paper published?

We'll get back to, you know, what's been been most disgusting.

(chuckles) - It is through KK Stevens Publishing Company in Astoria.

So it is printed within our four-county region that we serve.

We would not be where we're at today without Tim Stevens and Stevens Publishing Co.

He has helped us out a ton, from everything from deciding what was the right thing to charge for our advertisements to showing us how to design things, 'cause our engineer was, he'd worked with Adobe, but he was designing, they design parts for Caterpillar.

So a newspaper was pretty different.

- [Christine] A lot different, yes, okay.

- So there's been a huge learning curve for us and they have been super helpful and very gracious to us.

And we're very proud to have it printed within the four counties that we serve.

- Well, and that is a blessing.

So do you have stories from each of the counties in each publication?

And how many pages is your publication, your actual, you know, get to sit down and open it up and read it?

- [Josiah] So when you open it up, it's tabloid format.

- All right.

- We have 16 pages right now.

When we started, we had 24, and we learned that we were wasting a lot of space because we weren't very good at laying out our format yet.

So we figured out how to condense it, be more efficient with our layout.

So we're still at 16 pages.

We might bump up to 20 pages this month.

And our traditional layout is, it's kind of part newspaper and part magazine in a way.

It's almost like a magazine that reviews the news in the area.

'Cause we're not doing, obviously we're not doing breaking stories 'cause we're monthly.

In the middle of it, we have two pages of traditional news for each county.

So there's eight pages of a county section is what we call it.

And that's where your event previews, your, you know, human interest stories go.

And then we have a history column which was written by Harry Buckley.

He is from Galesburg, a retired judge there.

And then we have a garden section, which is written by Emma Rauschert.

She is a U of I Master Gardener and very talented.

So she has written our garden section since the beginning.

And that's actually Matt Rauschert's wife.

- Wife, okay.

- And then we have a small business spotlight that Hannah's in charge of and that is just going and finding the best and brightest small businesses in our community.

- So that's a small business, so she'll have four stories.

So a small business from each of the?

- [Christine] No, those are our columns.

I should, yeah.

- Okay, all right.

- So we have the history column, a garden column, and a small business column.

Eight pages of county news.

And then we'll have a front-page story, and traditionally, the front-page story follows the theme of the paper for each month and then the columns will usually follow something similar to it.

- Okay.

So give me an example of what the front-page story would be.

- So in January, our theme was, it's New Year, health and fitness.

So we had a gym in Macomb that is in the basement of the Macomb Salvation Army.

And it has been around for 30 years and there's a kinesiology professor at Western that volunteers his time and has personally purchased a lot of the equipment in that gym.

And it is free to use for anybody that is willing to go.

The only requirement is that you volunteer at the Salvation Army to help go and ring the bell, to go and carry goods to the food pantry.

So we did a whole story on him and those are the kinds of things that we try to get on the front page.

Something that is equally entertaining to read and also will benefit the community to know about it.

- It matters.

It does.

It matters.

Well, so what's been the most difficult part of your learning here now, other than not getting that paycheck?

- Most difficult part I think has probably just been overcoming the shift of our culture away from- - News.

- Not just local reporting, but also newsprint.

The easiest county that we've had an experience working with has been McDonough 'cause they currently have the most robust newspaper of the four counties that's still operating.

- All right.

- Warren has no locally owned newspapers.

Fulton still has one and Knox still has one, McDonough still has one.

McDonough's is very robust.

And so we found that the community and the advertisers are much more accustomed to the culture of advertising and newsprint and reading newsprint, whereas Warren, we've had a very slow traction with because they don't have, it's more of a memory for them.

- They've got nothing to compare it to, exactly.

Well, good for you.

Good for you.

- [Josiah] We're trying to change that.

- Well, I like that.

And then so eventually maybe you'll be able to add staff and you'll be able to have maybe students who are journalism students from Knox College or Monmouth College or Western.

Or even Spoon River.

I mean, there's several.

- Yeah.

So something that we are hoping to do, and I'll use this platform as a way to push it a little bit, but this summer, we are anticipating offering a internship program for high school students.

And it's not gonna be a paid internship and we're not looking to hire, but we want to launch a student edition of "The Forgottonia Times," and we are going to try and get as many students in for every aspect of the business, from the reporting, the editing, the graphic design, the sales, and they'll come in and shadow us for a week or two and then they'll produce their own edition of the paper.

And we want to, if they're up to the task and achieve it, do the whole thing for one month.

If we have to supplement some of that, then that's fine.

- So be it.

- We'd love to see one of our editions be fully produced by students in the area for the purpose of educating them in that world, but also just showing them that there are still jobs in the area for this sort of thing and that if they want to pursue it, it's there.

- I love that you're doing that.

You had lofty goals and you're setting up lofty goals for another generation.

So, good for you.

Good for you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for being here from Forgottonia.

- Thank you.

- And thank you for enlightening us, everybody, about Forgottonia and what you're up to.

Keep up the good work.

- I appreciate it.

I will.

- All right.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you for joining us.

Be well and be happy.

You're not forgotten.

(chuckles) (bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues)