FREDONIA – It’s a Monday morning at the Wilson County Citizen, and the paper’s staff is chasing breaking news: the annual Fall River barbecue won’t be held this year.
Staff might be an overstatement. The family-owned paper in Fredonia is run by Meredith Odell, with help from her sister, Ginger, and Ginger’s two dogs, Biscuit and Pepper.
Meredith Odell has worked at the paper since she was 4, more than 50 years ago. She’s wearing an orange and yellow tie-dyed T-shirt, working at a desk that could generously be described as “cluttered.”
“My title? Flunky,” she said with a laugh, something she does loudly and frequently.
“We don't really do titles. This is a family business … all of us have done everything.”
The Wilson County Citizen is one of four papers listed for sale on the Kansas Press Association’s website. And KPA director Emily Bradbury said all of them share a common thread: The owners are aging and want to retire.
“So most of our membership are small … dailies or weeklies in Kansas,” she said. “And so a lot of the people who have been publishing these papers for a long time have been doing so for 30, 40, 50 years.
“And so we are having an issue where we are having publishers who are 80 years old who would like to retire, which is completely understandable.”
Odell is only 58. But as the youngest of six children, the responsibility of running the paper has fallen to her.
One of her siblings who worked at the paper recently retired and another is having health problems. Her oldest brother, the likely candidate to run the paper after her parents retired, died in a plane crash in 1982.
Since 2018, Odell has lost both of her parents and her husband, and had her house burn down.
“I'm old and I'm tired,” she said, fighting back some tears. “ … Every day I come to work, and I try to make my dad happy. I try to do it the best I can, and it's a lot.”
Her dad was Joe Relph, a petroleum engineer by training. He turned down a job offer in Venezuela in 1961 and came home to Fredonia with his wife and five children. Meredith, number 6, would arrive a few years later.
The Relphs were just the second owners of a paper that traces its roots to 1870. The massive safe used by John Gilmore, the paper’s founder, still sits in the Citizen newsroom.
“My dad was truly a renaissance man,” Odell said. “He loved to learn. He loved photography.
“My mother loved to write and was a very creative person, and I think he wanted to come home.”
Rita Relph wrote the “Coffee Time Column,” based on conversations people in Fredonia were having over coffee at the pharmacy’s soda fountain. She also wrote a cooking column, “The Sometimes Gourmet,” often trying out the recipes on her kids at home.
“People will tell me … ‘Oh, I baked this, or I cooked this from your mom's recipe that I cut out of the Citizen in the ’80s.’ So that's nice,” Odell said.
The last couple of decades have been tough on newspapers across the country and in Kansas.
The Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University says there are 151 newspapers in Kansas, about 90 percent of which are weeklies. Compare that to 2005, when the state had more than 200 papers.
As the number of newspapers drops, ownership consolidation has risen. Medill says there are 86 unique newspaper owners in Kansas, down about 40 percent since 2005.
About 60 percent of the state’s 105 counties have one or fewer news outlets.
Despite all the dismal numbers, Bradbury with the Kansas Press Association said the newspapers that remain in operation are profitable.
“The thing about this is that I want people to understand is most publications are still making a lot of money,” she said. “And when I say a lot of money, I'm not talking about, you know, half a million dollars, but they're making money. They are meeting expenses and giving themselves a salary.”
But they have to work for every dollar. There’s nothing flashy about life at a small-town newspaper: Lots of meetings, lots of sporting events and lots of work.
“Journalism is not a nine to five job,” Bradbury said. “It is a grind, but it is an important job.
“When there is no one there to provide the watchdog role of going to the city council meetings … to the board of education meetings, as well as going to those wrestling tournaments and those football games. When there is no one there to do that, something is lost.”
Odell strongly agrees.
“I look at my responsibility as a journalist to go to these meetings, which not everybody has time to go, to listen to what they say,” she said. “And there's lots of stuff that nobody understands. But my job is to take that and present it to my readers in a way that they can understand.”
So that’s why Odell hopes to find a new owner who cares as deeply about Fredonia and Wilson County as she does.
“I've always called myself a community journalist,” Odell said. “I don't want to work in Detroit or San Francisco. I got an offer in college to go to Boston. Didn't want to do it.
“I want the things I write to make a difference, and I know that it happens here.”
So that’s why Odell is trying to avoid selling the Citizen to one of the many corporate chains snapping up smaller papers across the country.
“I think being bought by a company, a group, they're more concerned with the bottom line, and the bottom line is, it's tough in this business now,” she said.
“So … if you're not making the money you think you should, you can't pay reporters, editors.”
So Odell waits. And while she waits, she produces a paper every week for her nearly 3 thousand subscribers. Some of those papers still get delivered by paperboys on bikes.
And maybe, Odell said, she’ll find the right owner. Someone who wants to raise their children in a newsroom, like she did.
“What would be wonderful,” she said, “is someone who understood the role that a community newspaper plays in this small community.”
