Tuesday, Sept. 30, 1997 | 9:36 a.m.
PAHRUMP -- Think about it for a minute: Four newspapers? Here in one-stoplight, middle-of-nowhere, smallsville Pahrump? "People love to see a little newspaper war," says Dick Stromatt, publisher of the Independent Reporter, a scrappy new broadsheet for which the term "upstart" seems to have been coined.
There are 25,000 stories in the naked rural township, and poised to tell them are the twice-weekly Pahrump Valley Times, the ad-plump market leader (circulation 7,000-8,000); the Pahrump Valley Gazette (formerly the Death Valley Gateway Gazette; circulation 5,000); the 3-year-old Valley Observer (circulation 2,000); and the Independent Reporter, at five weeks the baby of the bunch (circulation 11,500; more on that later).
"I doubt you could find another town of 25,000 that supports four papers," Stromatt says. He will hereafter be referred to by his full name thanks to one of several quirks in the Pahrump media circus: Another Stromatt runs the Valley Observer.
That would be B.J., Dick's newly minted ex-wife. Like cell division, their split resulted in two papers where only one had existed before. Which is, slugging it out for third place behind the Gateway Gazette, which, alone among the four papers, is owned by a brothel magnate.
"We're more competitive with newspapers than we are with grocery stores," says Marge Taylor, executive director of the Pahrump Chamber of Commerce. "They're all good papers. It drives me nuts to read four papers a week to find out everything that's going on."
Each of the papers professes to tell it like it really is, without politically motivated embellishment. The Times, Gazette and Observer are, from all appearances, fairly standard small-town papers executed with varying degrees of polish.
"We actually have a news staff of people who have been in the business, who know what they're doing," Times Publisher Rich Thurlow says. "These are not their first jobs."
The Observer evolved from an advertising shopper owned by the Stromatts. "People came up to us asking for an unbiased (paper)," B.J. Stromatt says.
"The other papers, people felt, weren't giving a clear view. They were too political, or they had news from Beatty. We have a community emphasis. We try to give, we feel, another slant on things." If that's not enough, she has a few hole cards: "We have the most accurate TV guide," B.J. Stromatt says. "And large print for the seniors."
Dick Stromatt doesn't seem to be angling for the objective-view crowd. "One thing we'll do that the others don't is a little bit of investigative reporting," he says. Perhaps he's thinking of the banner story in the Reporter's Sept. 11 edition, headlined "Gun control, Nye County style." The story -- about the seizure of a Pahrump resident's pistol -- is a none-too-thinly veiled attack on the Nye County sheriff. "I'm not bashful about saying what I think," Dick Stromatt says.
"The Independent is basically an opinion thing," Taylor says.
For his opinion thing, Dick Stromatt boasts of having the largest circulation of any paper in Nye County, largely because he mails 11,500 copies free, whether those 11,500 households want it or not.
This bundle of papers "harks back to the 19th century," says UNLV communications Professor Barbara Cloud, "when every small town had two papers or maybe more." Virginia City, she reminds, had six in those days, several of them dailies.
"It's neat to see it happening," she says, "but it is unusual. If it lasts very long, it'll really be unusual."
Diversity is one likely explanation. Pahrump -- serene in its outback isolation, steeped in the Western myth of leave-me-alone individualism -- is home to a wide range of politicized constituencies: retirees, big-city refugees, sagebrush rebels, marathon commuters, the black-helicopter crowd. The small-town politics are said to be thick and virulent, the intrigues many.
Among such people are widely divergent views of the newspapers. Some consider the Times as an amen corner for the town's good-old-boy network; others see the Gazette as a bully pulpit for brothel owner Joe Richards. How, some wonder, can the Observer possibly stay afloat? Perhaps four papers stay alive by quilting a circulation from such a patchy population.
"Absolutely," says MaryAnn McNeill, publisher of the Pahrump Valley Gazette. "There are four papers here because groups or individuals want the public to know their version of what's going on. And some people have the money to back them."
Which brings us back to Joe Richards, a controversial, divisive figure in Nye County. "A lot of people won't buy the Gazette because they don't like Joe Richards," Dick Stromatt says. McNeill is acutely aware that her efforts at good journalism -- which netted the paper 13 awards, including general excellence, in the recent Nevada Press Association contest -- are underwritten by "the girls working on their backs up there."
Richards even fired McNeill in February. "Some of the reasons I was fired were that I refused to print some of the things that the owner wanted me to," she says. Two months later she was back, and Richards has kept his hands off. "He doesn't know what's going to be in the paper from week to week," McNeill reports. But he does know one thing that won't: "The word 'brothel' does not appear in the paper," she says.
The valley's politics and growing pains make for a lively place to practice journalism, McNeill says. "A newspaper editor is always, like, 'My God, what am I going to put on the front page?' But here, there's more than enough." If only it was easier to get good journalists to work for $300 a week and no benefits ...
Thurlow believes Pahrump's paper jam is less instructive about the town than about the favorable economics of desktop publishing. "What it basically says is how easy it is to put something out and call it a newspaper," says the Times publisher.
"I'm not going to insult the other people," Thurlow says, apparently forgetting what he'd just said about the Independent ("I'm not even sure that qualifies as a newspaper under any legal definition"). "They've all found a niche. If they want to put themselves out there as an alternative to the Pahrump Valley Times, that's fine."
Can they all be permanent press? Is there enough room and readership -- and most importantly, advertising dollars -- in the greater Pahrump metropolitan area to carry four newspapers?
"I think Pahrump can support three papers," B.J. Stromatt says, laughing. "I'm not sure it can support four." Take that, Dick!
"There's certainly enough room for the Pahrump Valley Times," Thurlow sniffs. As for the other papers -- what other papers? "We've never been concerned about it. We haven't noticed any reason to be concerned."
"They don't think I'm gonna make it," Dick Stromatt admits. He, of course, vows to prove them wrong.
"Something's gotta die," McNeill says. "I don't know which one it will be." It could be the Gazette, she acknowledges with becoming candor. Richards could lose patience or interest in his money-losing paper and shut the whole enchilada down. However, since he installed the Gazette in a spiffy new building just last month, it appears the paper is safe for now.
B.J. Stromatt, meanwhile, reports, if not a heavy cash flow, at least a black trickle. "I'm paying my bills," she says. "I'm not getting rich. It takes at least five years to really start turning a profit. We're not doing too bad."
If nothing else, Pahrump's "little newspaper war," its war of little newspapers, should make for some decent spectator sport -- reporter's notebooks at 20 paces! -- and perhaps result in a bit of civic good. If, as McNeill sighs, the podunk politics make it "very difficult to get the real truth," then at least savvy readers can vector in on it from four different directions.
"It's good to know you're getting all sides of an issue," Taylor says. "The community is very interested in what's going on. You get an overall view (from four papers) and you can draw your own opinions."
Meanwhile, there are two advertising shoppers in town, and while neither reports any immediate plans to add editorial content, you never know; this is Pahrump, after all, where people are always looking for an objective voice to really tell it like it is.
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