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Teri Finneman:        This is Teri Finneman. Today is July 29, 2020. I am interviewing Bill Blauvelt of the Superior Express in Superior, Nebraska, for the Community Journalism in Middle America: Challenges and Innovations of COVID-19 Coverage oral history project. So, Bill, why don’t you start out telling us how long you’ve worked in journalism and a little bit about your career?

Bill Blauvelt:        Well, I’ve been at the Superior Express now for 50 years. I started in high school as a sophomore helping with a weekly radio program. I was in charge of that in my junior and senior years. Then at the end of my sophomore year, the speech teacher that I’d been doing the radio program with came to me and said, “I’m gonna teach journalism in the fall, and you’re gonna take – be my photographer.” And I said, “No, I’m not, because I’m not taking journalism. I can’t spell, and I can’t write, then I won’t take journalism.”

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She said, “Well, if you have my pictures on my desk for a deadline, you know, before a deadline each week, you never have to come to class, and you’d get an A out of the course.” So, I decided I would take journalism and was the photographer for the school newspaper and yearbook for two years, became the editor of the yearbook before the [senior] year was out. Then she sent me off to Kansas State to take a summer photo workshop course, a one-week course for high school journalists.

She said – I was going off in engineering, where I planned to be -- but she said, “Let me get you acquainted with the campus. You’ll have a head start on all those other freshmen.” So, I took the course, and in the – some time in my first semester as an engineering student, I went back to the journalism building to look at the photography that they had on display of that semester’s work –

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        – and met the photography instructor, and he said, “Oh, Mr. Blauvelt, aren’t you ready to come home?” And I said, “Home? What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, this is your home. You don’t belong in engineering. You belong here in Kedzie Hall.”

And I said, “Well, I can’t spell, and I can’t write.” And he said, “Well, there’s journalism jobs that you don’t have to spell or write. You should be here.” Well, I think this all goes back to when I was 11 years old.

[Post-production addition: I suspect Bus Boyd and Professor Macy had been talking about me as they were acquainted from the days when both taught at Mankato High School]

There was a flood on the Republican River, and my family home was on a bluff, overlooking the river. And dad had taken a horse and gone down onto the bottom to help the neighbors drive their cattle to high ground. And I was envious and jealous, and after a while I took a horse, and went for a ride to see how bad the flood was. When I came back, the front yard was all full of cars out of Mankato, Kansas, coming up to see the flood. And [Frank] “Bus” Boyd, the editor/publisher of the Jewell County Record was among them.

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And he got everybody together, formed a – gathered around my horse, and had me tell them what I had seen on the river. What about the flood? So, I say that’s my first reporting job, and I – Bus must’ve liked me, because looking back, he begins to court me, to – he just happened to stop and see me. Every now and then, he’d say, “Well, Mary,” his wife, “was hungry for a Dairy Queen, and we decided to come to Superior to get a Dairy Queen, and we were wondering what – how you were and what you were doing.”

And he’d stop and visit a while. And Bert Macy, the photography instructor, had taught school together at Mankato at one point. And I’m not so sure that Bus and Burt hadn’t taught together and decided to [phone rings] to try to court me, rope me into journalism. And eventually this evolves until we’re – Bus is grooming me to join the Boyd family –

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of publications as the editor of one of their newspapers. And it turned out that I did not go to work for Bus. I went – I joined the Miller family at Belleville, and if you’re familiar with the K-State Journalism, the A. Q. Miller School of Journalism, is part of that family [and the Huck Boyd Institute and Boyd Hall.] And on my 24th birthday, it was announced that I would be the new editor of the Superior Express. We had bought the, well, the Express now. Fortunately, the bankers were more willing to loan money then than they are now. The – and my willingness to work, and the Millers’ experience, they loaned us the down payment and some operating capital [laughs], and we started on less than a shoestring, and I’ve been here ever since, you know?

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Over the years, we added other publications or, you know, [and] we’ve done various things. We had – I had come out of college with an idea for a weekly farm-type paper, and we did the Farmer Stockman of the Midwest for probably 15 years or so. And we added the Jewell County Record, which was Bus Boyd’s publication. And we added the Nelson – Nuckolls County Locomotive-Gazette at Nelson, Nebraska, to our family of publications.

So, we have currently three weekly newspapers, and we do a monthly newsletter for rural singles called Country Connections. That’s kind of my history. I did a little radio work, but really have never been paid much for radio. I was the fill-in broadcaster on the Saturday following the assassination of President Kennedy, which, you know, was a different day to be running a radio station.

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Your programming was different, too.

Teri Finneman:        Tell us about that. What was it like to do that?

Bill Blauvelt:        It was kind of spooky. Uh, you know, a lot of the broadcasters on that day did not run any advertising. We were a small station, hard up. We still ran advertising, but the selection of music, it was somber funeral-type music you played that day.

We did not play any upbeat popular music. They were, you know, the country was in mourning, you know? You were wondering what was going to happen, you know?

Who – who, why? Why had he been assassinated? What does this mean to the country, you know? [Exhales] I – it would be much like those if you remember the 9/11 attacks on the country –

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a president’s assassination today was much – very similar to that. You know, we’ll always remember, you know, when we got the word, when the principal came to us. I was in Marjorie Smith’s journalism room when Raymond Richards, the school principal, came to the door and told us the president had been assassinated in Dallas, you know? Later, I got to be a pallbearer for Marjorie Smith, and riding to the cemetery, the – one of the other pallbearers said, “Bill, you remember where you were when – when President Kennedy was assassinated?”

And I said, “Well, yes. I was in Marjorie’s classroom.” And he said, “Yeah, so was I.” He said, “You realize that?”

He said, “That wasn’t very long ago, was it?” And I said, “No, no. That was just a couple of days ago, it seems like, in my mind.” And he says, “Do you realize that her birth was closer to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln than we are today to the assassination of John F. Kennedy?” And it – has been to me an illustration that’s been very meaningful on time.

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Time -- we don’t see it the same way. We think it’s a long time ago when really, it was just in the history of man. It was just an instant back, yeah. When I was a freshman, I came home from school, and grandad asked me, “Who do you have for teachers?” “Anybody I know?”

And I said, “Oh, no, nobody you’ll know.” And he kept pushing me and pushing me, and finally I said, “Well, I got this one real old lady from Republic.” Like, “Well, what’s her name?” “Well, you don’t know her.” “Well, what’s her name?”

And I said, “Well, Marjorie Smith.” “Oh,” he said. “She was Marjorie Longfellow. I remember when she was going to be born.  I was out to her parents’ farm to build a room on, an extra bedroom, and I plastered it, you know?” He saw Marjorie as a baby in arms, and I saw her as an ancient lady at about 60, so you know, 14 views age much differently than did 80 –

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which he probably was at that point.

Teri Finneman:        What are the circulations of your newspapers?

Bill Blauvelt:        They have declined. The Superior Express, at the peak, was about 4,300. It’s now about 2,200. The Jewell County Record, when we [took] it, was over 1,000. Well, it was over 2,000 when the Boyd family had it.

It had dropped in half by the time I acquired it, and it’s dropped in half again. We’re down to about 500 with it. The Nuckolls County Locomotive-Gazette we’re around 700 today. Uh, we have not fared well.

A couple of things to explain that. We’re in a decline – [an] area of declining population. I remember when Superior was 3,300 people. Now it’s about 1,800 to 1,900. When I started here 50 years ago –

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we had 12 high schools in our circulation area. Today we have three. So while I get discouraged with the population drop or the circulation drop, I mean it’s kind of paralleling the – what’s happening to the population in the area.

Teri Finneman:        And how many people work for you?

Bill Blauvelt:        Probably today about 10. Normal is probably 15 to 18. During the pandemic, we have had employee problems as far as retention. We’ve had, for example, one quit to go home and care for his children who were no longer in school. They thought the wife had the better job and they wanted to keep her working, and he would care – he would go home and care for the kids. Another –

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was elderly or – well, I shouldn’t say elderly. He’s younger than I am. I’m not elderly. I’m just a – just a mature kid, but um, he was – had some health issues, and he was afraid to be out and about, and we had one move out of state. Another one is gone this week, I think, looking for a job out of state.

One, today was her last day. She’s going to a different job, so we’ve had five people quit, you know, in just the pandemic, which is the most that we’ve ever had at any one time and trying to adjust. We’ve run some help wanted ads, but people are not – they’re not applying. There’s … I’m not sure why they’re not interested in coming to a newspaper. Some of it is bad press, you know? We seem woe is us.

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We are starving, you know? The newspapers are dying, yeah. Yeah. I think that’s wrong, but you know, it’s discouraging some – maybe some young folks from the career of journalism.

Teri Finneman:        When did the impact of COVID on your newspapers first start?

Bill Blauvelt:        Mid-March. The governors in both states [Nebraska and Kansas] closed the schools, and that was really the start of the problem, you know, and it has been a real problem, revenue-wise. We don’t have much retail left. We primarily are – our advertising revenue is coming from social events, activities, and so many of those have been canceled. Families are not having their big anniversary, open houses, or you know –

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high school graduations would’ve been pretty special sections, and you know, the community celebrations. This week should’ve -- we should’ve advertised this week for the annual Lovewell Lake Fun Day. That would’ve maybe got us some … ribbon sales, T-shirt sales, advertising, you know? It didn’t happen.

The Threshing Bee, the Firecracker Run, the – you know, Vestey [Victorian] Festival. It was county fairs, all the things that need special sections, special advertising. The commercial printing, you know? Those things have not happened, and so newspaper revenue is probably off a third, and commercial printing, which includes our screen printing, whatever, is about half –

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of what it was prior to the pandemic. So, to have some people leave, some payroll reduction, is not bad. We need to trim expenses some way, and … we have combined the Jewell County Record and the Superior Express into one publication for the pandemic series. Now you can subscribe to either one, but … we were printing only one paper. The Nelson office, we closed that office, and the employees are still working, but they’re working from home, so our utility cost, at least in Nelson, has been reduced. We haven’t seen much change in our salary, but you know, we – and we have combined all of the –

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assembly and the typesetting, and those types of functions is all being done in the Superior office now instead of -- all the accounts receivable posting, that type of work is being done in one central point, which we think has improved our efficiency.

Teri Finneman:        What has been the reaction of the communities to have the merged newspapers, and do you think that’s something you’ll continue after the pandemic?

Bill Blauvelt:        Continuing after the pandemic is probably dependent upon what the post office will allow us to do. It’s rather ticklish to have the Jewell County Record as officially in Kansas, and the Superior Express is in Nebraska, so to maintain legal status legally, the Express qualifies as a Kansas official paper, but it’s easier for people to wrap their mind around the idea that the Jewell County Record –

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at Mankato is the official paper for Jewell County. Uh, so whether or not we can combine the two permanently -- reader response has not been – very few negative complaints. The readers have accepted it pretty well. The Nelson Nuckolls County Locomotive is that situation.

I haven’t heard a single person complain because the office there is not open. Nelson is 13 miles away. It’s the county seat, but that office has not – it’s not been a problem with it being closed. The Mankato office we’re changing personnel there today. We have a new office manager started at noon today, so the prior one was not doing a good job of –

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being there and dependable and we had lots of complaints because the office was not open. I think they will accept the combined paper easier, easier than they will accept their office not being open. We have sold office supplies and things in Mankato that we would not do in Nelson. The Mankato people will not come to Superior as often to shop or do whatever. Nelson does not have a grocery store, so if they need groceries, they’d probably come to Superior to get them. Stopping by the newspaper office is not a problem, but Mankato still has a very good grocery store, and those people are not coming north as much as the Nelson folks come south, and it’s further away. It’s more like 25 miles to Mankato. Um, but time will tell.

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The content of the Nelson paper has been more different than the Mankato paper, so while it’s the same county, to close it as far as the content and the circulation in Mankato, the Superior Express has more subscribers than does the Jewell County Record. In the northern half of Jewell County, the Express is a dominant paper, where in Nuckolls County, the Locomotive-Gazette is the dominant paper in the north half of the county [and The Express in the southern part.] They have more subscribers by far in the northern towns than we do with the Express, so to combine those two legally, would be easy, but probably not with the readers. And financially we sell a lot of ads twice. They buy it in both publications –

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because we don’t duplicate circulation that much. If they were to combine, we would cut revenue by – because they’d only buy one ad. A good illustration of that is this week, the South Heartland Health District has bought an ad encouraging people to comply with the COVID regulations, and you know, they spent $150 on each paper. If we were to combine those, we’d only get a $150 payment.

Teri Finneman:        So, you mentioned some of your employees working remotely. What other kind of safety regulations have you put in place for your staff during the pandemic?

Bill Blauvelt:        The Superior office is no longer open to the public. We have a slider window that we didn’t know how brilliant we were in ’75 when we remodeled the building and put in –

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three slider windows in the front -- you’ll see those in the picture when it comes to you. So our front door is locked, and you could knock on the window and we slide it back. And we don’t have any French fries and malted milks or hamburgers for sale, but we’ll take your order and pass it out through the window.

And only rarely are we allowing a customer to enter the building. The Mankato office we have been slow to figure out what to do there. We don’t have the slider windows, but just today, with the new office manager, we kinda hit upon a plan that we are going to stop people in the entryway and hang plastic and put a counter in the doorway. And they can come to that –

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counter and talk through the plastic. Like, our post offices have done that in this area, and we think we’re going to copy what they have done in Mankato [Superior] right away, to keep separation between our employees and the general public. The Nelson office is closed. We have a dropbox. People can leave things in the dropbox.

One of the employees [at Nelson] is an elderly lady, kind of semi-retired. She lives to where she can see the building, but – and the other lady there, her husband has a job [with the railroad] that’s taking him – with the railroad -- that’s taking him all over the United States. And they’ve been in New York State, for example earlier this month. So we’re not even letting her into the office here in Superior. She comes and stands at the window like anybody else –

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for her 14-day quarantine period from – after going to New York State for a funeral. So we have tried to, with reporters, you know? We’re trying not to send people to events. We’re trying to interview [by phone]. We’d make the interview by telephone or at least a long ways’ apart.

High school graduation for Superior was two weeks ago. We did not have anybody, for the first time in my life in this business, first time in 50 years, I have not gone to multiple high school commencement exercises. Well, I’ve not been to any this year. Here in Superior, they did not allow any photography. Parents could not take pictures.

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They hired a photographer. I assume the photographer took a picture of everybody receiving their diploma, and the school provided the newspaper with candid shots of seniors, which it was very fine coverage as far as I was concerned. We did not have anybody there. County fair did not allow a photographer on the grounds. Did not allow the public.

It was closed only to 4-H members or FFA members. Yeah, no – and no animals stayed on the fairgrounds. They brought them in for a show, had to take them home that same day. The exhibits, you came in one door, registered your exhibit, and you had to leave through a different door so there was no cross traffic. So we have no pictures of kids –

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people at the fair, which we normally would’ve had, but Extension in both of our counties took a nice bunch of pictures of youngsters with their exhibits, youngsters on the fairgrounds. In Nuckolls County, we’re going to run perhaps a yearlong series. They’ve been sending us two pictures a week of maybe a family, usually with kids, and we’ll say, “The Smith family, and this is what they exhibited at the fairground. This is what the ribbons were.” And we were doing that, and each week we’ll feature a family or two, or a grouping or two and we don’t know how many weeks that’s going to run now. They did not think it would go a complete year, but it will go a number of weeks, and so –

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I think the readers would be happy with it, but it’s hard on revenue because normally we would’ve put all of this together into a special section, sold advertising, and we’re not. We’re not helping revenue this year. I haven’t seen – go ahead.

Teri Finneman:        Oh, I was – what is the pandemic like in your area? How many cases have there been?

Bill Blauvelt:        Not many. No, our population is, of course, small, but we have about seven cases in each county. Jewell County had their – most of their cases early, and you had a few of late. Nuckolls County had one early. Well, they had none for the first several weeks, then they had one that got – somehow it must’ve been a bookkeeping problem because we had one case today, and he was recovered tomorrow. So, I think he was assigned to the wrong county there for a while.

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Then we had an explosion. We had about six in the same week. There was a golf tournament at the county seat, the next county north of us. Some of our people went and they exposed everybody. Thayer County to the east of us had about a half a dozen cases come out of that golf tournament.

Our county had about a half dozen come out of that golf tournament. We have one store in Superior: a ladies’ ready-to-wear store was closed for two weeks because of close exposure to COVID, which is going to be a – that just happened this week [phone rings]. We have sidewalk bazaar here Saturday. Her store was the key anchor for the sidewalk bazaar, that there was the draw, other stores were kind of riding on her coattails, and if Carmen’s [Style Shoppe] is not open –

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it’s going to hurt the sidewalk sale immensely, but that’s as close as we have had, you know. We have others in our town that are being quarantined. We’ve started now two weeks ago with the hospital offering private testing, and that’s increased the number of positives. But our county is not taking it very seriously. Our county is not – it’s the problem elsewhere. We have, in Jewell County, Lovewell State Park, which is located on a lake. 11th and 12th of July, there was a big party involving out-of-county people that had an explosion. They went to –

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people that were there went and carried it to events in two or three other counties. We don’t have anybody here that is so far been identified as being part of that, but it really scares us. I’ve not been to the state park this year. I normally spent a lot of time every week at the state park.

I’m kind of a lake rat …. and the park, Nebraska parks were closed for a while. And so we had lots of people out of Nebraska. We had three-day weekend from mid-March on with the number of people were there on the weekend. All the trails, all the spots were filled. The lake was crowded, and they have a number of [meat]packing houses in Nebraska within a, let’s say, 100-mile radius of here that were some of the hottest spots in the nation for COVID in the early days.

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It was a real bad place to work at a [meat]packing house. About everybody came down with COVID, and so Grand Island is 90 miles away. They had one of the packing houses. They’d tell me you drive the lake, and the rigs were all registered to people from Grand Island. They couldn’t – Nebraska parks were closed, so they came to ours.

That means they stop, and they buy a sandwich at Subway, or gas at Casey’s, or cups at Dollar General, or whatever. The stores that are on the road to the lake are busy on the – with lake traffic on the weekends, and these out-of-county people some of us live in fear of. What are they bringing in to us? Uh, so far we, you know, our headline this week is, “COVID Outbreak Traced to the Lovewell State Park” –

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you know? And this – the park has canceled their activities, did not have their fireworks show, did not have their Fun Day. Park’s still open, but they’re not, and any of their group activities have been put on hold for this year. So, next question, I guess.

Teri Finneman:        So, we’ve talked about how your news strategy has – has had to change for print. Has your new strategy changed for online or social media during the pandemic?

Bill Blauvelt:        It really hasn’t, but it changed just before the pandemic. We introduced a new website with a paywall just shortly before the pandemic.

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Had we known the pandemic was coming, we probably would not have introduced it at that point. Our website was among the first ones in the area dating to the 1990s, when we put it up for the first time. If you check and see what [Adobe] PageMill version two, when it was introduced, that’s when we put up our website. We were one of the first buyers of PageMill version two and did a homebrew website.

We did – it was not set up in a way that we could really track who was visiting it. We could not go to our advertisers and say, “We have this many subscribers on the website.” We were posting our newspaper for 10 or 15 years. We’ve been putting the complete newspaper on it. We did not think that anybody local would be reading a –

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web newspaper when they could actually get one delivered to them or pick one up at the news – at the counter store. Well, we decided we needed to be able to have statistics that we could go to the advertiser and say, “Well, we only got 2,000 subscribers in print, but we’ve got all these web people.” And introduced that just before the COVID outbreak.

I have been amazed. I can’t give you any hard statistics, but I’ve been amazed at the number of local people who have paid for a subscription to the website, the number of people that have asked for a website subscription. It’s free if you subscribe. If you take a print edition [phone rings] we will give you the online free, and it has far exceeded my expectations –

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the response for it. What – did COVID influence that? I’m sure COVID has influenced counter sales. I delivered newsstands this morning, and our stands in Mankato in particular are selling about half of what they sold before the pandemic. Nebraska stands are off some as well. Uh, are they getting – are they reading it online? I hope so.

People are saying that online readership is up because of it. I don’t have anything to count. I can’t tell you what it was before, so I can’t give you a number and say, “Well, look how much higher it is today,” but I think it probably is up. Our social media presence –

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I’ve never – I’m a great skeptic with social media. I have not figured out what I can do with social media that makes it positive. We have a social media presence. We post some stuff, if not daily, at least weekly but most of what I have had great response to is historical stuff. I probably will put up tonight a picture of three women with their jeans wet to their knees that had had to wade out of some flooded houses in about 45 years ago because Lost Creek was on a rampage here in Superior.

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This week the water did not, but we had a torrential rain on Sunday evening. We have pictures of water over the road to the winery and – and cars driving through puddles, and splashing water, and so forth in today’s paper. And I probably will put it on the social media tonight. “See what happened 45 years ago? We had this much water in Superior.” Uh, people are liking our old photos that I’m taking out of picture files, negative files. I’ve saved – I’ve got 50 years’ worth of mine now that I can go back on, and then a photo studio here in town changed hands, and they gave me their negatives dating from World War II up until, oh, probably 2010. I’m not exactly sure when –

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they stopped. I haven’t had much interest in the late stuff. It’s the early stuff that I’m interested in, so county fair time, we didn’t have new pictures that week, so I took some pictures from 1952, and printed, scanned the negatives, and printed those in the newspaper, you know, of people that were still alive, that were in the area. Um, you know, “Here’s Dr. Thompson, the veterinarian who died last year. Here he is showing his prize, triple winning animal in the 1952 county 4-H fair,” uh, which I hope it generates some interest. I found that was of less interest than if I move forward about 20 to 25 years, so I get way more response to the pictures from the ‘70s –

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than I do pictures from the ‘50s, you know? Probably because the number of people still here, still alive, still reading the paper that remember what it was like in 1975 or so.

Teri Finneman:        How do you see the business model for the industry changing as a result of the pandemic?

Bill Blauvelt:        I don’t think the business model will change because of the pandemic if the business community survives. What’s going to be left after the pandemic? How many businesses are we going to lose? Who will be here to advertise?

We had a restaurant that we printed place mats for, a busy restaurant, standing order for placemats. Don’t ever let them run out. Just keep cases of them ahead, and we’ll pick them up as we need them. And they were closed –

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from the large shutdown until this week. They opened yesterday, tried to reopen again. I’m not sure that they made it. They were having trouble getting help, so I’m not sure they’re going to have enough help to open yesterday, but [exhales] – and now that’s certainly hurt our placemat business.

Uh, but will the restaurant survive? Will the retail shops, the beauty-driven – uh, the hairdressers, the clothing stores, the – it just goes on. We had, we thought, a farm store. Our Shopko store had closed here in Superior when the Shopko chain went bankrupt, and we thought we had a buyer for the building –

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prior to the pandemic. They had indicated to us that it was a go. They were going to be doing it. Well, the pandemic arrived, and they put it on hold for quite a while. They have bought the building now, but there’s no sign of any life.

They’ve not turned the utilities back on or any indication that they’re going to open. Hopefully they will open at some point. We’re quite anxious, newspaper-wise. They – in the other communities that they’re in, they’re buying an insert, a circular in the paper, in the weeklies each week.

We’d like that business. We’re missing the Shopko business. They were running one or two inserts a week most of the time with us, so that’s taken out probably $30,000 worth of revenue a year with that closure. So what’s going to change is –

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what do we have left for – for advertisers? Will the people have found other methods? If you’re having a family reunion, I shouldn’t say a family reunion, like an anniversary or a, you know, some kind of a gathering in which you’re inviting the public, will they have figured out a way to do that on the cheap that leaves the newspaper out? And we won’t get their 2x5 ad or whatever, saying, “Come wish Mary a happy birthday.”

So, if that happens, you know, it’ll be a real problem. I’m old enough to remember the polio epidemics of the 1950s [in 1952]. We lived in fear. The swimming pools were closed. There were things then just as they are today. We didn’t get together much, but we survived it, and business went on pretty much as normal. The bigger threat to us –

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I think today, is the internet and not, uh – not the pandemic. What’s happening with our stores, you know? Is Amazon going to control all of us? Will there be any – will there be any choices left out here in rural America?

I’ve run into office supply troubles with the 9/11 terrorist attack, killed my office supply business. I’m about – doing about 20 percent of what I was doing in office supplies prior to the pandemic, but my wholesaler was big in furniture. And following the terrorist attack, the new store, the new office building construction, the office renovation business collapsed for several months. There wasn’t any of that going on –

[0:42:00]

and they lost a big share of their business, and they did not have finances to carry them through and they disappeared. The people that are left selling office supplies don’t wanna fool with me, can’t deliver the merchandise in a timely manner. I had with the old vendor – they were still shuffling checks between banks, you know? I could get overnight service if I called an order in by 5. I had it at my door at 8 the next morning with the bank courier. So, you need an inkjet or you needed a toner cartridge, order it by 5, newspaper will have it in the morning. I was willing to accept the responsibility or provide a drop place for the courier coming through during the night –

[0:43:00]

to leave that order, and I was doing a lot of business, but I don’t have that today, and I’m having to go through another retailer who takes 10 percent for handling it, and that may take two or three weeks before I get it. That business – I’ve only got about 20 percent of the office supply business I had prior to 9/11, so if pandemic does the same thing, you know, the screen-printing business is – is virtually zero. I bought an $8,000 inkjet printer last August in anticipation of work this spring and summer, and it virtually hasn’t done a thing.

[0:44:00]

Will the Firecracker Runs, the county fairs, the, you know, Threshing Bee, the – all these events that we sold banners and – and shirts and caps and whatever to, will they come back? And if they do, will they buy our products? Have they figured out how to advertise some other way? The next weekend we have citywide garage sales.

Well, we’ll see what our numbers are. 50 to 70 garage sales advertised in our newspaper would be normal a few years ago. In recent times, that’s been down around 35. This year, there is Facebook –

[0:45:00]

trades and transactions pages, which people are already advertising they’re going to have a garage sale on. Will they come to the newspaper and – and pay our fee, and get our sign to sit in the front yard to say they’re having a garage sale? Uh, they may not, so I’m saying you need – go ahead.

Teri Finneman:        How has the pandemic influenced your views of the role of journalism in society?

Bill Blauvelt:        I don’t think it’s changed it. There are a lot of people who are very critical of – well, a lot of people don’t believe that there is a pandemic. They think it’s all political. Soon as one man told me last week that he’s the Republican County chairman in one of our counties, and he said, “Well, the pandemic will be over on – as soon as the November election. There’ll be no pandemic after that. This will be cured.

[0:46:00]

It’s all political [phone rings].” Uh, and so you have a number of people who are very unhappy with journalism because we’re reporting a pandemic that [they claim] doesn’t exist. It’s all the politicians made-up, and so are we – are they going to be so angry with us that they don’t come back? You know, one of my ladies that comes in and stuffs papers for me on Tuesday night.

I heard her say last night, “Well, I don’t listen to Nashville News anymore because,” she’s referring to television, “all they do is talk about that pandemic, and that’s all fake news. I don’t care to listen to that.” Uh, do we have the same thing with our readership? Now, I’ve not been printing that many pandemic stories, other than what – how they impact locally. You know, I gave a pretty good play –

[0:47:00]

this week to the, you know, community spread based from the party at Lovewell Lake, you know, but I – if that would’ve happened in some other county, I probably wouldn’t have maybe even talked about it. I think the people, I think our readers, should not look at our newspaper, which is old before it gets delivered for their day or immediate news. They should get that someplace else, you know? I might like – I might want them to think they should go to our website, or our social media post, or whatever, but you know, with printed media, the post office has delayed our deliveries so bad, and they’re talking about doing it some more. They’ve got a current test out that presorted mail that arrives at the post office, let’s say, this morning. A carrier will not touch it until he comes back after his –

[0:48:00]

off his route today, and then he’ll sort it for tomorrow. That’s going to delay the delivery of the newspaper 24 hours in about all of our communities. The people are being fed up. They’re angry. I’ve got several phone calls a week with people complaining because the paper is taking so long to get there --

and the Post Office is – is personally delaying it and making decisions which is – I think they wanna commit suicide. They’re driving business away by delivering the – by slowing the delivery of the mail, and I attribute much of our circulation loss to the post office. I can show you what was lost in neighboring communities to the east. If you get 16 miles east of us, the paper I mail today will probably not get to you till Monday.

[0:49:00]

Mailed Wednesday, Monday delivery. It should be Thursday delivery. You know, when I started here, our paper did not come back from the central printing plant until 5 on Wednesday, and we had the first issues to the post office for the first post-dispatch at 5:30, and we were there by 6:30 for everybody, and they were delivered the next morning. Now, we have to have them here by 10 in the morning on Wednesday morning, and they maybe not be delivered until Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday.

They don’t have Sunday delivery. Anyway, we have a web press because of the post office. When we started, a group of us had went together. We were printing at a central plant, and we were the last paper to be printed. And our printing schedule was never advanced, never changed, and the last year that we printed there –

[0:50:00]

we had to go to the sectional center every issue because the mail had left Superior before we got back from the central printing plant.

[Post-production note: To clarify, a post office section center was a central mail processing facility. In Kansas they were located in places like Concordia, Salina, Wichita, Hays, Topeka and Kansas City. Mail went from Mankato to Concordia for Superior to Hastings. And for all of my years in the business the post office keeps taking it longer distances and requiring earlier dispatches.  Mail we enter at Mankato now goes to Wichita for sorting. Mail entered at Superior goes to Omaha where it is automatically delayed 24 hours. Mail we send from here on Wednesday will not leave Omaha until Friday.]

And I spent the bucks and put a press in. We’re still running that press. We’re one of the few places, few papers our size that are still printing our own paper.

As you saw, they were all black and white. There’s no color, you know? They are a bit old fashioned. Our website, if you look at the web’s papers, they’re full of color. But the post office is a big enemy of ours – to cross the state line, to take it to get it delivered within less than a week, it would be – if I mail a paper to Webber –

[0:51:00]

which is less than ten miles from here, today through the normal channels, it’ll be next week sometime before it gets there. So I’m driving all of the Kansas papers to a Kansas post office, and I need to add a driver and take the papers going east into that area, because we’re not – the paper in Byron, which is 16 miles away, has to go to Omaha, Nebraska. It’ll be – get in there during the night tonight. They will not look at it until after the dispatches tomorrow. It’ll be sorted some time for Thursday for dispatch on Friday. At the very earliest, it’s going to be into the communities on a Friday, and it’s often Saturday or Monday before it’s delivered. I think of a college professor, a community college teacher who has grandkids living in this county –

[0:52:00]

who has been so excited with our website, our web paper, because he can read that on Wednesday afternoon before he leaves his school office and plan what he’ll do that weekend to take in the activities that his grandkids are involved with, but if he waits for the mail paper, it doesn’t come until Monday, and he’s missed all the activities, but this way he gets to see if they’ve got a class, you know, if there’s a play, or a ballgame, or whatever that he’d like to be in attendance of, our web – our web product will tell him that. So, I’m thinking that the newspapers have a real future, but maybe not print. The need for information is not going away, but how we deliver that may change.

[0:53:00]

I got here because the prior owner was afraid of offset. I was on the board of student publications at Kansas State the year that the web press was purchased, and the Kansas State Collegian became the first daily newspaper in Kansas to be printed offset. Now, I had nothing to do with making that decision. Somebody ahead of me made the decision, but I happened to serve a while on the board of -- the year it was – the decision was made. And my electronics background – Compugraphic introduced a photo typesetting computer and we were one of the first places in Nebraska to install one. I had people coming from even dailies in here to this little weekly to look at this photo typesetting computer.

[0:54:00]

The old-timers that were used to running with linotypes and hot metal were scared of this electronic wizard that used photographic paper, and was as big as a refrigerator, and full of hand wired circuitry. Well, they were just a combination of resisters, transistors, capacitors, transformers, whatever stuff that I was interested in from my ham radio days and electrical engineering. I wasn’t a bit afraid of that machine. I was able to keep it running.

Never had to call a service man. Talked to the factory about what it – what it’s not doing, you know, what they thought we should check and so forth, but never had to have a service man on the premise to work on it. But my predecessor was terrified of a machine like that. He had, uh –

[0:55:00]

six years before, spent a bunch of money adding linotypes, adding a web press. The place was equipped the very best it had ever been, but I cut it all up for scrap iron, and I didn’t run any of that equipment once, you know? The day I moved in, I moved in with – stuck the photo typesetter in, and we took off. Then we moved forward into ’85.

I bought Macintoshs. I went to the Apple dealer in Grand Island. I had a childhood friend who was a salesman for him, and I contacted them about buying Macintosh computers. The laser printer was being introduced, and I got a little excited about it. And uh, I had talked to a service man –

[0:56:00]

the Stauffer publications out of Topeka. And he said, “Stauffer had decreed that every shop, every one of their newspapers, before the year was out, would have a Macintosh computer. Don’t know what we’re gonna do with it, but we’re – we’re going to experiment with it.”

Well, I started looking and thinking, “Oh, I see what I can do with that. It could be great,” and I started looking around to buy a Mac, and the dealer that had several stores in outstate Nebraska said, “Oh, there’s not enough demand for laser writers. We’re not going to become a dealer for an Apple laser writer. We – we can’t afford the cost of becoming a dealer.”

And I said, “Well, if I don’t buy it from you, I’m gonna buy it from somebody. I’m gonna have one,” so I don't know what they did, but they eventually sold me that laser writer printer. I figured maybe they bootlegged it through another dealer. I’ve still got it in my “museum,” uh –

[0:57:00]

the first laser writer to be installed west of Lincoln and I had papers from South Dakota coming down here to see how we were producing a newspaper with Macintosh and laser writers in those days, so I’ve seen a lot of changes. Right now, the industry would say, “I’m stuck in the mud. I’m way behind. I have not gone to pagination,” and some of the things that everybody else is doing.

I’ve not seen a need for it because I’m right now about 20 feet from our press, so I did a – a clip one time for the Weather Channel on a storm, and they asked me how -- what the storm was gonna do to my paper delivery schedule that day, and I said, “Oh, nothing. My wife and I are here, and I’m in the press room talking to you right now during this interview.” I said, “We’re getting ready to run.

[0:58:00]

We’re gonna print the paper. We may not get it delivered because the post office may not run their trucks, but we’re gonna print it on time. I’m not dependent upon, you know,  – .”  I had a guy looking about – talk to me about seeing if I would sell this spring, and he could’ve printed in Iowa. He wasn’t gonna [to run the press]. That was obsolete.

Nobody runs presses anymore. I can get it printed in Iowa. You could. I’ve talked to the guy in Iowa, but the logistics of getting that paper delivered to us with the Nebraska weather, there’s days that you can’t get a truck from Iowa to Superior. The time schedule, the guy doesn’t look that bad if – when the weather’s good, when the truck runs. If the truck doesn’t run, the paper’s gonna be late.

[0:59:00]

And I like the idea that I can go by – I can run the press –

Teri Finneman:        So, we have just a few minutes left. So, what would you want journalists 100 years from now, who may be covering a new pandemic, what do you want them to know?

Bill Blauvelt:        That there’s hope. That it’s not – that it’s not, you know, it’s not the end of the world. If I remember the 1918 – I don’t remember personally, but my grandparents went through the flu epidemic of ’18. We went back, and we ran some stories in our papers, went back to the old papers and – and during that flu epidemic – and updated, wrote stories about what it appeared to be like to those people. Um, they had it worse than we have it now, and the world survived, you know? I would tell them to have hope and –

[1:00:00]

it’s not – don’t jump off the cliff because the world is ending, you know? There’ll be – the sun will come up tomorrow and you’ll have to adapt. The world may be different, but you adapt and the need for information does not go away. Just try to serve your readers, provide them with what they need to know on a schedule that – that they can – that helps them, and you entertain them some.

You educate them some. You try to keep them out of trouble, you know? The newspaper is a combination of … it does several things … if I were to have completed my master’s degree, I wanted to do the research on the importance of –

[1:01:00]

of the weekly newspaper to the growth and well-being of the community. I had hit – my major professor had looked at some numbers on the number of kids that went onto college, and what – what the content of those newspapers were. It was not an exhaustive study, but it appeared that the newspaper was a good reflection of how many people went on to college. What was in the newspaper influenced who went to college. And so that’s influenced my newspaper.

I have tried to run things in the paper, to encourage people, to make them think this is a good area to live, a good area to raise a family, an area with a future, with prospects, you know? Not that there’s not negatives. You can’t avoid the negatives. You’ve gotta print the bad, but don’t dwell on the bad.

[1:02:00]

Mix in some good along with it, you know? Life is – is not all negative. There’s positives to it, and there’s – I don't know what the good is coming out of COVID, but there’s gotta be a good side to it someplace. Let’s keep looking for it and try to present it so that newspaper 100 years from now who’s having their own problems, keep looking up. Don’t – don’t crawl in the hole that – a hole that’s down on top of you, but to go out and try to find the way out of the tunnel, out of the darkness.

Teri Finneman:        Okay. This is the conclusion of this oral history.

[End of Audio]