It was more than 10 years ago that I showed up in Elizabethtown for the first time. I had been living in Philadelphia, where I’d worked for The Associated Press since 1998, mostly working night shifts to cover the news of Pennsylvania. But I’d reported for three small-town daily newspapers before that, so I knew how important local news was to small towns.
I had read about the closing of the Elizabethtown Chronicle. I had long been interested in owning and operating my own newspaper, so I decided to come to a town of 12,000 people that suddenly had no local source of hard news. I wanted to explore the viability of starting a newspaper to fill the vacuum left by the Chronicle.
And the reaction I got upon talking to local people in the business community could be summed up pretty easily: Please, move here and do this. We need you.
So I did. I rented an apartment. I quit my job in January of 2010 and moved furniture into my apartment. Then I rented a storefront office. People kept coming in asking when the first issue would come out.
With so many people eagerly awaiting it, I put the first issue out on Feb. 4, 2010 — in retrospect, sooner than I should have. Every week for the next seven years, I was responsible for everything about the Advocate. I reported most of the news, edited anything reported by someone else (mostly sports), laid out the pages, designed and sold advertising, updated circulation records, you name it.
For some of that time, I had help with circulation, getting a contractor to go to the printing plant, pick up the papers, take the ones for subscribers to the post office, then driving around to stores and vending racks. But for a lot of the time, I even did that myself.
Even though I was running about the tiniest business imaginable, I was frequently treated as if I were a big shot. It reminded me of one of my favorite fictional newspapermen, Dutton Peabody from the 1962 movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” At a 19th century convention, Peabody gets introduced as “that distinguished member of the Fourth Estate, founder, owner, publisher and editor of the Shinbone Star, Mr. Dutton Peabody, Esquire!” Peabody replies, “Thank you, thank you, Mr. Chairman, for those kind words; but why don’t you tell them the whole truth: founder, owner, editor, and I also sweep out the place.”
Eventually, I managed to eke out a small profit, but when LNP Media Group approached me and wanted to buy me out, I was certainly willing to listen. They promised to put me on a salary (a steady income is a wonderful thing), give me the budget to hire a full-time sportswriter and take the advertising and circulation issues out of my hands so I could focus on journalism. They did just that. They put me on a three-year employment contract.
But now it’s time to do something new. It’s unfortunate that my plans to go to The Gambia in western Africa to serve in the Peace Corps are on hold indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic. I’m going to wait this out at my mom’s place in Ohio. While I’m there, I very likely will work on completing the bachelor’s degree I never finished.
So, what’s next for the Advocate? My successor as editor, Andy Fascnacht, is working on some new things that he thinks readers will enjoy, and I concur that they’re good ideas. I hope readers will bear with him as he learns about the western part of Lancaster County while simultaneously serving as editor of two other newspapers serving Ephrata and Lititz.
I’m grateful to all the people who showed me friendship as I showed up in Elizabethtown as a stranger. I’m glad I did this. There aren’t many people who started newspapers from scratch in the 21st century and didn’t lose their shirts. The Advocate is still publishing every week 10 years later and appears poised to keep publishing every week for many years to come.