by Madeline Phaby
@madphabes
Senior History & Sociology Major
Storm Lake is an anomaly in more ways than one. Pick a rural Iowa town of about 14,000 people at random, and the odds of it having a foreign-born population of more than 30 percent are, I think it’s safe to say, quite low. The odds of it having not one, but two local newspapers? Even lower.
Indeed, Storm Lake boasts two separate newspapers in an era when few small towns can claim to have just one. The Pilot-Tribune is the older of the two by nearly 100 years, as it has existed in some form since the 1890s. (We’re looking forward to involving its editor, Dana Larsen, in our class this semester.) But it’s the Times, founded in 1990, that lays claim to a Pulitzer Prize and a documentary.
Brothers Art and John Cullen serve as the editor and publisher of The Times, respectively, and they keep the paper afloat with the help of a small-but-mighty staff made up of mostly family members. Art is the boss—and the author of the editorials that earned The Times a Pulitzer—but the most common byline on the paper’s stories belongs to his son, Tom.
We asked Tom many questions about local journalism, growing up in Storm Lake, and the town’s unique culture. His answers were insightful, but, as a journalist myself, his views on the importance of local journalism were of particular interest to me.
I work as an editor for The Miami Student, our newspaper here at Miami University. We’re completely student-run, but because the surrounding city of Oxford has no professional newspaper, we’re the city’s primary source of local news. That’s a lot of pressure for a team of 18-22 year olds whose editorial board changes every single year, but as far as newspapers go, we’re privileged. We put our souls into our paper only to get accused of publishing fake news by people twice our age, but we receive funding from the university – we don’t experience the anxiety of needing to sell subscriptions to keep our newsroom’s lights on.
I was eager to ask Cullen a question about how The Times has maintained a high-quality print paper while also shifting some of its focus onto its website, as journalism is trending increasingly toward a digital-first approach. We at The Student have spent countless hours pondering that very question, and I’m sure the staff of The Times has too, but Cullen’s answer was simple.
“Whether it’s print or digital or video, you have to write stories that people will read above all else,” Cullen said. “If you don’t have that, you’ve got nothing.”
The need to write stories people will read, Cullen said, caused him to occasionally test the boundaries of what was “acceptable” to write about. Specifically, he mentioned writing exposés on large agricultural suppliers, many of which also advertised in The Times. Journalism is so competitive, Cullen said, that a publication that wishes to stand out needs to cross into spaces “where other newspapers just wouldn’t go.”
Like many other small, local newspapers, The Times hardly makes any profit. As hard as that is, Cullen said it removes some of the pressure to please the masses that exists in larger newspapers with significant streams of revenue. As Cullen puts it, “you do not write stories for sources; you write stories for readers.”
Even more bluntly, a brief guide Cullen wrote for interns at The Times states that the newspaper’s guiding philosophy is to “print the truth and raise Hell.”
Whether it’s print or digital or video, you have to write stories that people will read above all else. If you don’t have that, you’ve got nothing.
— Tom Cullen
Armed with that clear mission, The Times does its best to cover Storm Lake’s most pertinent issues, though Cullen admits the publication isn’t perfect. Despite the town’s noted diversity, the paper’s subscriber base is overwhelmingly white and college-educated. Expanding its readership to include other demographic groups—especially those with a first language other than English—has proven very difficult for the paper. Cullen said the best remedy for this issue is to continue publishing stories about aspects of Storm Lake life that people of all backgrounds care about—the schools, the churches, the Tyson plant—in hopes of “getting to the issues that matter.”
The questions of who the paper is meant to serve, and which issues ultimately “matter,” are ones that every newspaper with limited resources, including my own, have to confront. Above all else, though, small towns that have local newspapers have a noted advantage over those that don’t: whenever something important happens in town, be it big or small, someone will be there to cover it.
“We’re the backstop, at the end of the day,” Cullen said. “And if we’re not there, then no one else is.”
Madeline Phaby is a senior majoring in history and sociology with a minor in political science. Her research interests include the American West, Indigenous history, and Latin American history. She currently serves as an editor at The Miami Student, Miami University’s student-run newspaper, and she loves that the Storm Lake class combines her interests in history and journalism. In her spare time, Madeline enjoys watching baseball, doing crossword puzzles, and reading. She hopes to eventually go to law school and become an immigration lawyer.
