In Medford, Wisconsin, the sole weekly newspaper plays a vital role: mediating disputes over chickens.
Brian Wilson, news editor of the Star News, said officials in the city of around 4,000 residents went on an eight-week warpath against allowing people to own chickens within city limits in 2010. The city planner “strongly opposed” allowing chickens in the city because “chickens have no place in cities in his mind,” according to Wilson, leading to a residential quarrel.
The community got so invested in the story, he said, that hundreds of people huddled together to read a city council meeting summary about the chickens.
The Star News provided coverage of the chicken debate every step of the way as the only weekly newspaper in the county — a news desert, or a community with limited access to credible and comprehensive news that feeds democracy at the grassroots level, according to the Hussman School of Journalism. As thousands of small newspapers across the country have shuttered, the Star News looks for ways to continue comprehensive local coverage while facing tighter constraints.
The Star News employs nine full-time staff members, a number which editor Brian Wilson said is only three less than the employment count when he started in 1996. Changes in technology eliminated the need for certain specialized positions, including a darkroom technician.
With the closure of nearly 3,000 local newspapers in the U.S. since 2005, covering local news has both changed and stayed the same in Medford.
“In some way [local news coverage] hasn’t changed. We’re committed. We’re intensely hyperlocal with our coverage, the biggest change has probably been the increase of citizen journalism,” Wilson told The Daily Cardinal. “Where in the past, we would have a reporter driving out to rural communities to cover something, we'll now have people who will snap a picture [with their phone] and send us information.”
Still, a pronounced shift to digital news and social media has repositioned how the Star News reports.
Wilson said the Star News has shifted to becoming “the trusted verifier of the news” with the rise of citizen journalism — when members of the community contribute to the breaking of news.
Wilson has worked for the Star News since 1996 as the sports and associate editor before becoming the news editor in 2005. He thinks people still rely heavily on the newspaper.
“I think the Star News does a pretty good job at being informed and informing the community on what’s going on,” Jaco Vander Berg, owner of local coffee shop Uncommon Ground, said.
As a business owner, Vander Berg said he buys the Star News for his customers.
But with limited resources, Wilson has had to make hard decisions when it comes to what to cover. A gathering of 750 people takes precedence over an event with five. Event previews are prioritized over recaps.
Wilson also said he considers the Star News sports coverage to be “amazing,” noting that sports editor Matt Frey is “beloved” by community members and that staff members are “very active” in the community.
And for Medford Chamber of Commerce president Sue Emmerich, reading the Star News is an important part of the week.
“I read about everything that's in the newspaper, whether it's business downtown whose kid is in hockey and scored the winning goal, to new businesses,” Emmerich said. “I check the advertisements that are in the papers to make sure we're not missing somebody new that came to town so we can visit them and see if we can help them. I read the obituaries to make sure that we have someone representing people at funerals.”
Emmerich said the newspaper does a good job covering not only Medford but “our whole county,” sending live reporters to Stetsonville, Rib Lake and Gilman rather than “just taking minutes from meetings.”
Star News tribulations, COVID-19 hardships
But distributing a newspaper has become more difficult in the past years, according to Wilson.
“The Postal Service has declared war on community newspapers,” Wilson said. “They want to drive them out of business.”
Due to changes in standards of service, the Postal Service now sends parcels out within the week instead of mailing out postage the next day. Postage rates have also increased, Wilson said.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan, announced in 2021, implemented money-saving changes, such as slowing mail, according to Business News Daily.
“It’d be like the professor saying everything that was a C is now an A, and then saying look at all these kids on the Dean’s list,” Wilson said. “That’s not how it works.”
Now, the Star News currently publishes about 40 pages per issue, a number that has declined over the past decade and a half.
“Ideally, I’d like to do another 12 to 16 pages,” Wilson said. “It’s a function of advertising and having the staff and the stories to do it.”
And although the Star News is willing to make an investment in staff, finding high-quality reporters is a challenge, Wison said.
“We’re perhaps not what we were in 1960,” Wilson said. “But we also live in a different era where there's a lot more fractured media marketplace.”
But Wilson does not think the Star News is failing.
Of the nearly 20,000 Taylor County residents, Wilson said approximately 4,500 subscribe to the Star News. About 50-75% of those subscribers live within eight miles of the Star News’ Medford office.
However, the COVID pandemic strongly impacted the Star News, Wilson said. Since the pandemic, subscriptions are down and revenue has decreased.
“All those events that used to happen and all those things that would be advertised went away,” Wilson said. “Even now four years after, those things have not been where they were. Hopefully at some point they will be.”
Wilson said it is unclear whether the business model of low subscription prices and subsidizing newspapers with advertising is sustainable. With big national banks now more prevalent in small towns, investment in the community becomes less likely, he said.
Star News connects community with local politics, combats conspiracies
In the meantime, Wilson and the Star News continue to hold influence over local government through their coverage of elections, conspiracy theories and even chicken debacles.
“We impact significant changes in our communities,” he said. “Elected officials take our opinions into account. Our style is like a shepherd trying to herd cats.”
The Star News sends questionnaires to candidates and runs profiles on them prior to elections, Wilson said. The main focus is on highly contested races in larger communities.
The newspaper also covered conspiracy theories that popped up after Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest — an area about 50 miles north of Taylor County — was surveyed for gold. State regulators approved a mining company’s plans for drilling in 2023.
Typically, the gold deposit is too expensive to extract but becomes profitable when gold prices are high enough. Large black helicopters with metal detectors that look like “giant fishing nets” flew over the area to survey it, said Wilson.
“They're doing low-flying flights, which in a fairly right-leaning, fairly conservative and conspiracy-happy community, went over real well,” Wilson said.
The Star News had to write stories explaining the flyovers to quell conspiracy theories about the helicopters, Wilson said.
And as for the chickens, things ended up being rather black and white.
“It boils down to ‘there's nothing that says you can have them, so you can't,’ and the other side saying ‘there's nothing to say I can't have that, so I can,’” Wilson said.
Ultimately, a compromise was reached allowing up to three chickens under a conditional use permit which would be granted following a public hearing and notification of neighbors.
“Those are the types of experiences that keep us going,” Wilson said.
Tomer Ronen is the Features Editor for the Daily Cardinal. He has covered protests, state politics, sports and more. Follow him on Twitter at @TRonen22.
