Presses don’t stop in small Texas town
After the community fixture ‘Del Rio News-Herald’ closes amid pandemic, a website publisher fills void with new weekly newspaper
ADEL RIO, Texas t the Chihuahuan Desert’s eastern limits, in a parking lot above Lake Amistad, Brian Argabright photographed anglers and their catch at the Border Bass Battle for the Del Rio News-Herald, a chronicler of the wind-swept border town since 1884.
Three days later, he would learn the tournament story would be his last for the News-Herald.
On Nov. 18, the nationwide newspaper crisis touched Val Verde County when the paper printed its final edition. The end was swift for the staff and a shock to residents, who had somehow expected their newspaper to go on forever.
Leonard Woolsey, president of Southern Newspapers Inc., the corporation that owns the News-Herald, came to Del Rio to fire 10 employees. For him, it was the right thing to do it in person. Revenue could not cover payroll, even after the company secured a multimillion-dollar federal COVID-19 relief loan.
The closure left Val Verde County without a trusted newspaper, another victim in a trend researchers at the University of North Carolina dubbed “The Expanding News Desert.” An estimated 300 newspapers have closed, and 6,000 journalists have lost their jobs over the past two years, according to their research, as circulation fell by 5 million readers.
In Texas, 134 counties — a little more than half the state — have just one newspaper and 21 have no newspaper at all. Del Rio, the Val Verde County seat, teetered on becoming the 22nd.
Enter Joel Langton, a 56-year-old military public affairs veteran who decided to turn an online events website he had started into a 16-page, ad-supported weekly tabloid, Del Rio’s 830 Times. “The News-Herald had a great staff and a bad business plan,” he said. “Publishers came in from the outside every 18 months. Del Rio is a complicated culture. I’ve been here for 15 years and still don’t know everything going on.”
After the News-Herald closed, Langton stepped forward to turn his 5-month-old 830Times.com, named after the local telephone area code, into a newspaper. He had a web designer and knew someone who could make layouts. But the publisher needed reporters to cover Del Rio.
To fill his pages, he brought on Argabright and another former News-Herald writer, Karen Gleason, as freelancers.
“The fact they said yes makes me tear up, because I have so much respect for both of them,” Langton wrote in the newspaper’s first issue. “We all share the same passion — Del Rio. We love this town and want to keep people informed.”
The 830 Times is a solution to Del Rio’s biggest problem, as Langton sees it — how to keep residents from moving away.
“People say there is nothing to do here, but that’s not true,” he said. “The 830 Times was originally set up to let people know about the fun things going on.”
Langton is right. There is entertainment in Del Rio, although most events are of the outdoor variety.
On the day the Border Bass Battle was being fought at Lake Amistad, the Malto family hosted a cabalgata — a traditional Mexican horse ride — celebrating Diego Malto’s 15th birthday. All were welcome to join.
The cabalgata made the news on Noticias Del Rio TV, a local bilingual Facebook page with nearly 85,000 followers. The 830 Times so far has 3,000 followers on its Facebook page. The disparate numbers hint at the obstacles Langton faces in his push to make the 830 Times succeed in a world dominated by Google and Facebook advertising and competitors with Spanish-language appeal. “For now, I’m footing the bill,” he said. “Am I gambling on the print product? Yes. I could lose it all.”
At age 24, Langton was married, broke and desperate for work in Minnesota. The Air Force was hiring, so he enlisted.
The military moved him every three years or so, an itinerant life that mirrored his upbringing as a preacher’s son. He worked as a public affairs specialist in Indiana, Maryland, Arkansas, Nebraska, Turkey and then Cocoa Beach, Fla., which he called “the perfect place to bounce back from a divorce.”
Langton remarried and moved with his wife to his final post in Del Rio at Laughlin Air Force Base, the largest pilot training facility in the United States.
Later, he transitioned from the military to a civilian public relations job at Laughlin.
Del Rio, population 35,700, is tiny compared with its sister city, Ciudad Acuña, on the Mexico side of Rio Grande, which has more than 200,000 residents. Thanks to the Air Force base, the federal government is the largest employer in Del Rio.
Langton operates his news empire from a sideboard he uses as a desk in his dining room, dealing with his reporters and the company that prints the paper, 153 miles away, by cellphone.
A full-color photo on the front page captured the annual Nutcracker performance at a downtown theater in the 880 Times’ inaguaral edition. Inside, a note “From the Publisher Dude” teased an article penned by Norris Burkes, a retired Air Force chaplain, recalling his “wacky marriage proposal.”
With the newspapers stacked in his SUV, Langton drove down Veterans Boulevard, an area where Del Rio began to expand northward on open savanna after the Plaza del Sol Mall opened in 1979.
Plenty of people are counting on Langton to make a go of it. Steven T. Webb, a former Del Rio police officer who won a runoff in December for the City Council, said the fact that only 12 percent of voters turned out in the general election was partly attributable to the News-Herald shutdown. “Social media, friends, that’s the only way we get the news now,” he said. “It hurt us, the newspaper closing.”
For now, Langton is focusing on advertising and editing, leaving the story ideas and writing to Argabright and Gleason. Del Rio’s 830 Times is crawling, he said, but he hopes soon the newspaper learns how to walk and run.
“The 830 Times is a leap of faith,” Gleason said. She had known Langton all of two days before the first issue was finished. “I just want this paper to be a voice for the community, interesting and truthful stories about people in Del Rio.”
Langton concedes that his efforts to provide Del Rio with a newspaper it can hold in its hands are probably temporary. He believes the printed word is going extinct. “I hate to tell you this, buddy,” he said. “But in five or 10 years, newspapers won’t exist anymore.”
He figures he has five years to prove himself wrong.