Transcription
Matt: Hi, this is Matt Avitable again. I’m here still on July 1st, 2024, with the great Clay Edmunds. He is interviewing me today, so I want to talk a little bit about the Mountain Eagle, the paper that I own that I’ve been involved with now for seven and a half years. I’m not going to go into the entire history, but the really brief thumbnail sketch is that the paper was founded in 1982, in large part thanks to Don Conover, who had a vision of a paper that would encompass much of the northern Catskills. And so it had a heavy focus in, let’s say, Greene County and then parts of Delaware County, like Stamford, and gradually grew and grew and grew, paper became very large and attracted a young man who wanted to come work at the paper and cut his teeth on local reporting. And that was my dad. He was at the paper around 1985, 1986, but had to leave because, I just happened to be born. And so he had to leave the paper. The paper continued growing. Mr. Conover died, unexpectedly in the early 1990s, and the paper had fallen on hard times. My father had actually come back around that period. And so a lot of my early memories were of an office that the Mountain Eagle had on Railroad Avenue. Both my parents worked for the paper at the time and would walk down and I’d be, gosh, probably around 5 or 6, and our little cat Tiger would come and follow us and visit us, at the office. It was really formative to me seeing that as a young man.
Unfortunately, the paper continued to decline, went to a couple of corporate owners. My father wound up leaving around 1993, but I always had this real fond spot in my heart for the paper. I had promised that I’d only do two consecutive terms as mayor of Middleburgh, and I kept my promise. And so I knew in my second term that I wasn’t running again, and I needed something else to keep me running around and busy in addition to teaching. And so I heard that the Mountain Eagle had fallen on some hard times, that they had laid off quite a bit of staff. So I reached out to the paper. They were owned by a conglomerate called Columbia Green Media, which is owned by another conglomerate, Johnson Newspapers, out of watershed. Watertown. Excuse me. And so, to make a much longer story short, I started printing, a small newspaper called the Schoharie News in late 2016, in anticipation of our negotiations, Mountain Eagle came back to me, and we wound up making a deal. So we merged the two. The Schoharie News, which is its own section in the paper now and the Mountain Eagle in January 2017.
So I’ve been at it now for about seven and a half years. It’s been a major challenge, but it’s been one that’s taught me a lot, made a lot of mistakes, had a lot of successes. But ultimately, I’ve learned that keeping local paper alive is very important. And here we wind up writing the first draft of history, something that, let’s say, local historians, will be looking at in 20, 30, 40, 100, 150, 200 years. I could see someone like Clay or Karen Cuccinello looking through those papers, trying to find out the personalities of the individuals that lived here, the ebbs and flows, the local area, the major challenges and some of the more mundane things that are contained in the paper.
So it’s a weekly… we do 50 weeks a year, not on Christmas and Thanksgiving, get them out for Fridays. And it involves just a little bit of everything taking photos, writing, interviews, delivery, putting the actual pages together in layout. It’s quite an undertaking, but ultimately I feel like it’s one that involves a great team. That’s probably the best part of this, to be able to work with several dozen people, including my father, who rejoined the paper in 2017. A lot of really talented people. One of the things that have gone out of my way to do is, since I don’t have a degree in journalism, since I, you know, learned a lot on the fly with journalism, and I don’t consider myself a journalist just to get, people who knew more about this than me and take their advice and be able to work with them. And so we’ve been able to do that. I’ve had some alums of the paper, people have been with the paper or other papers since the 80s. My dad, Liz Page, Brian Sweeney, Mike Ryan, Scott Keadong, I think he might be the 90s. So he’s I think he might be the youngest of the bunch as well as a whole bunch of new writers. And so it’s been this major challenge. But you know what? Working with a team that is excellent people that I can really rely on, people who make our lives a little bit brighter, at least my life a little bit brighter in the paper, a little bit brighter has been a real treat. And so in the future I’m looking forward to learning more about it. But I think right now my five minutes are almost up. Thanks for listening.