Editorial
The news that the Daniels County Leader would be ceasing publication at the end of July was heartbreaking.
Leader publisher Burl Bowler told me a couple weeks ago, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Coming from a multi-generational newspaper family, I feel terrible for Burl and Roz who had to make the very difficult decision to close when a buyer was not found.
Faced with the closure of The Herald-News in May 2019, I know the feeling Burl is wrestling with. I’m a generation behind Burl so I had years ahead of me and couldn’t walk away, leaving Wolf Point and the surrounding area without a newspaper to cover government actions, school news, births, deaths, achievements and tragedies. My staff and I started a new newspaper from the ashes of the 100-year-old Herald-News — a paper my family had owned for over 70 years. The communities we served, our advertisers and printer rallied behind us and the Northern Plains Independent was born the very next week — without missing a single issue.
Now in our eighth year, our circulation continues to be strong and we win awards in the Montana Newspaper Association’s Better Newspaper Contest every year, proving that we are doing something right. We continue to hold our area’s government officials accountable for their decisions and keep our readership informed of the happenings of the area.
We look forward to expanding our readership with the good folks who have supported the Daniels County Leader for so many years and provide them with the community journalism that is so important to rural areas, including continued coverage of Scobey’s championship high school sports teams.
To do this, we need some help. We are advertising for additional people to join our staff — a sports reporter, freelancers and someone to assist with ad sales/design — so that we can expand our coverage area into Scobey and Daniels County. We’ll need the people of Scobey to help with news tips and advertisers to continue to support the newspaper to help fund those new positions.
The people of northeast Montana, including Daniels County, deserve to have their stories told. We will continue to be the ones to tell them.
