One (Deming) Headlight: Come on Try a Little, Nothing is Forever
How a Small New Mexico Newspaper Is On The Verge of Extinction Without a Radical Plan of Action
I have a bad habit/addiction.
Not smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling or sex, although I have had 3 of those 5 in my life at some point in time. (If you guess which ones correctly, you are eligible to win a $25 Subway Gift Card)
I have a worse one. I tell the same damn stories again and again, and in my last 4 books, I have used the same story about small-town local newspapers and how in 1999, I used a guest column to get me un-expelled from high school. I’m like my dad or my late grandpa. I talk about it again and again, because it is one of my best stories.
Let me cliff’s notes it: Columbine happened on 4-20-1999. The next school year, my alternative high school (3 rooms, 30 students) was going to be retrofitted with huge doors, only having one entry into the school, and we all had to wear an ID lanyard and when they opened the peephole thing, I would have to say, “James Baca 0421” or something like I am a damn prisoner just to get into my school. Dude it was so stupid.
As a shy 16 year old, I didn’t know how to speak my mind back then, but the spirit of George Carlin lived in me, and I questioned all this security “theater” and refused my ID. I got expelled from school, just like 1 in every 3 kids in Socorro, NM at that time. I just said I didn’t want it, and the person issuing the IDs told my principal I called her a “dumb bitch.” That was a lie.
I cried. I cried to my mom. She called. They said “He needs the ID or he can’t come back.”
Then, I decided on something. People always said I was an entertaining writer, so I thought if I got my story out, people would side with me. So, since social media wasn’t a thing, I decided on the local paper, The El Defensor Chieftain and I wrote a “guest column”, although I didn’t know what that was at the time. It was about 400 words. It was long, but it was scathing, talking about the security theater of my little baby school in the guise of helping protect us after Columbine
.
Dude I went to school with ex-cons, gang members, and unwed moms. I dealt with tough classmates. No one was going to shoot them up.
I wrote it, it was published, and guess what? I was allowed back into school, and they never bothered me again the whole time I was there! In hindsight, they meant well, but I utilized a tool to speak to the people and my voice was heard.
Thank you, El Defensor Chieftain
I wish I had a copy of that. Well, I am sure I will find it at my grandma’s house if I really looked.
But that moment at age 16 was a lifelong memory of my love affair with newspapers. I used to read the ABQ Journal and ABQ Tribune with my dad at the age of 6, learning about current events. Anytime my parents would go on a trip, they would bring me a copy of the local newspaper. It was part of who I was. I enjoy the media, and I enjoyed the idea of the newspaper.
I subscribed to the local ones, dated a girl who’s stepmom worked for the Mountain Mail in Magdalena, NM in the early 2000s and in now in my time as The Notorious Banker, I have made tons of friends at the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NY Times and the Charlotte Observer to name a few. I revere them and I revered their workplace.
But let’s be frank. We consume news differently these days. People dissect what is happening around them with what I call “chisme” social media like Facebook’s Las Cruces Community Watch and FitFamElPaso on IG.
They don’t subscribe to newspapers anymore, not even the version on their phones. Gannett, the child bride of Satan to the newspaper industry has made the papers they own unreadable. Even though they have local names on them, they are filled with the same dull USA Today-lite tripe that in every single one of them.
(and there’s a lot more papers that they own…)
Las Cruces Sun-News was down to 1 reporter I believe as of a couple weeks ago, and the sports reporter, Jason Groves moved onto the news side, leaving a gaping hole in sports. UNM/NMSU football game didn’t have a recap for 2 days and Las Cruces High/Mayfield never really got a recap of their game. Ridiculous.
I get the pain in hiring people, especially at Gannett… because who wants to be furloughed and be told to be thankful they didn’t lay you off?
Paywalls make it impossible to want to learn about your community, and while I am for paying for quality journalism, the $1 for 6 months the Las Cruces paper offered a while back wasn’t even worth that, because it never gave me extra perspective to what was already known about a story. It sucked and still does.
In banking, we talk about value. There’s no value in the Las Cruces and El Paso papers. What about small town ones?
Well, I would say there is definitely value in them, because whether it is a little leaguer winning a trophy or a local Kiwanis club holding a bake sale, there is VALUE in seeing someone you know in the paper and having them be reported on. Social media steals some of that thunder, but “physical media” as the young kids call it can be important to a community ego as well.
My long winded monologue is taking me to Deming, NM and the newspaper there, The Deming Headlight, a tabloid-style newspaper which talks about all things Luna County. It has a circulation estimate around 3,000.
To give you some perspective, this substack alone will get me about 2,500 views and I am barely scraping by a living, so I can only imagine a big newspaper with staff and costs.
I worked my ass off to get those views over the years though, discussing banking, business, customer service on social media. I pushed to get every one of my 40,000 total followers to subscribe so I can have sponsors underwrite what I do, and I got about 12% of them to bite. Sales are hard!
With podcasting, a couple books I am writing, and other things I do to make money, I am barely above water. But I love it, because it is all me.
That paper was owned by Gannett until recently, when it changed hands to more local ownership. But as I have mentioned, much like the aliens in “Independence Day” where President Bill Pullman outlines why the aliens are on Earth, and I am paraphrasing, “They take all the resources and move on.”
This is Gannett’s CEO
But yeah, Gannett makes a paper a shell of what it once was, bails town, and leaves people from the community with the scraps. Sounds familiar to big banks right?
Deming Headlight for what it is worth, is a good paper with great staff working there, some of which have worked in my adopted hometown of Las Cruces before.
Because I am not FROM there means I usually don’t give a shit about what’s going on there, but I would still read it. I read everything. But I am not their target demo to rescue them from disappearing.
Nickolas Seibel, the publisher posted an editorial this morning that caught my eye and found its way onto my weird-ass Elon Musk X/Twitter Algorithm. It spoke about the future of the paper in matter-of-fact terms, a way almost no company would ever speak on their future.
Here’s the text of it if you don’t want to leave my Substack, which highlights another problem I will get to by the way.
It’s real. It’s meaningful. It’s heartfelt. I believe that, and I have a black heart that Bank of America taught me to see through all that and just get to the selling, James.
But in doing a huge deep dive this morning because I was in the feels about a local newspaper going away in this great state, my first thought on the website, and the reason I shared an image of the editorial was…”Wait, there’s no ads on their whole website?”
It’s funny, most critiques would be there was too much ad creep on a webpage, but I didn’t see any on theirs at all. While that is noble and clean-looking and cool, it’s easy to see there is no revenue being generated on that page.
I created this ad for Deming Domino’s in less than a minute. One minute ad creation and a five minute phone call with the franchisee asking for that business can net you some easy money.
I hate sales. All I did was sales in banking, but it’s a necessary evil in this case where a small town paper needs to find money to survive.
I am currently writing a book where I talk about my grandfather’s obituary at another small town paper, and it was going to cost $176 because they formatted my heartfelt words into unreadable paragraphs with no more than 6 words a line and hyphenated works like An-nette (my aunt) and bas-ketball. I didn’t pay for it, because I felt swindled. They made more lines out of my text by truncating the space, and charging me more. It made me think of others in that boat. Ethically, I could not pay for it, so I will write a damn book about Grandpa before I pay.
Sales are hard. But Deming and surrounding areas is a huge space. There’s enough ad money to go around. A static ad on a webpage could net some easy money. Have a company sponsor the sports section or whatever. Deming High School Football presented by Valero.
The creativity needs to be amped up to 11 in order to survive with the big boys. I don’t get why they don’t have that.
I had a regional bank sponsor my podcast for 10 weeks and I got $2,500 based on my reach. It helped me pay my bills while I was battling unemployment for my money. It’s there if you ask and you know how to ask for money.
I can speak for the bank part that he mentions: Big banks don’t lend money in the way you see in the movies anymore. I never closed one business loan in 13 years at BofA, and I was the number 1 salesman in my region. It’s because I learned that BofA and big banks don’t want to deal with small businesses.
Small town banks? Well, usually local banks know the down and dirty about everyone’s finances, coupled that with personal animus or disagreements about content, and you have more hurdles that can limit success in funding your paper.
Plus, when ownership of a business changes hands and you have owned it less than 2 years, there is a less than 1% chance they will even want to talk to you.
While I agree with the premise that no newspaper in a town actually leads to loss of community and increased political polarization, I can tell you I read a good amount of letters to the editor on their website today, and the demographics of those who wrote the letters tells me those folks already have their minds made up about certain things.
There are many Andy Rooneys in Luna County and while there is nothing I miss more in banking than talking with cantakerous people about stuff that I may not agree with but love hearing them talk about, I feel there is an underrepresented part of the Deming Community not represented in those letters.
That is when outreach is important. You have to let people know you are there, especially those people under the age of 40 (my age) who don’t give one damn about newspapers.
In sales, we are always told, the customer may tell you they never thought about a product, and your job is to tell them why those people can’t live without it. Asking for help is one thing, but you need to find a way to get that plea out to people who may not know you exist.
Talk to your neighbors and the businesses you frequent. Tell them that you read the Headlight, and ask them to support our work.
Dude… if I relied on word-of-mouth in sales or even my personal life, I would be living with the veterans in a weekly rate motel, unmarried, and even more broke than before.
You know what got me to number 1 in sales in banking?
Asking people for their business myself. Don’t have people ask businesses to support you. You ask the businesses! You need to be persistent. A “no” now may not be a “no” later.
I didn’t have very many dates until I got to college at age 20.
Ages 18-20 - 3
Ages 21-24 - 16
That’s different women BTW. There were some relationships in there.
What changed? Well, social media allowed me to hype myself up a little more as it was created during that time, but ages 18-20? I was scared to ask women out, so I had friends of friends ask for me. Don’t do that. LOL. Your paper is at stake. Don’t rely on others to save you. Rely on yourself and your belief that Deming needs you.
Much like when you are a kid and you see your teacher at the grocery store, and it blows your mind that you saw her do normal people things like you, people don’t realize the plight of the local newspaper is not dissimilar to their plight in life. Yes your teacher has to eat too!
The Deming Headlight and all other local newspapers can’t cosplay being a big time newsroom.
They got to do things unorthodox, outside of the box, against the grain to compete, much like Milan High in the movie, “Hoosiers” based on a real-life story. Or you have to be “Little Giants” and draw up plays like “The Annexation of Puerto Rico.” You can compete and win if you have the desire to. You got to be creative.
Finally, and this is why I actually wrote this column. The Headlight published the plea this morning as I was working on my book. I guess it took and/or resonated because according to them, and another article came out about How you can subscribe.
Oh, Elizabeth… I’m coming to join you, Honey.
In this world of people using GoFundMe (which is my next book project I am sketching out, btw), Onlyfans, Patreon, and people selling crap on eBay and Facebook marketplace, I find it hard to believe you can’t set up an easy way to accept payments. Oh, my God, my head hurt when I read that, and I mean that with peace and love.
I don’t know what has been “in the works” for them, but I went to my Paypal account and pretended to create a subscription model for my content using Deming as the example, and I got it done in 1m 50 seconds one handed, including stopping for typos. It can be done in no time. I literally did this as I wrote this column.
I hate Zelle, but use that too.
Ditto Venmo, Cash App, or Apple/Google Pay.
There’s a interchange fee to use some of those for businesses, especially Paypal, but I mean, my god, even though I am against them usually, charge a .25 cent surcharge fee if need be to pay for your expense. Don’t be afraid to have a million buckets to get your riches
That all goes direct deposit into the business account, and you can have customers/readers request how they want their Deming Headlight.. by email or in print. Address, email or physical are captured during the process and bada-bing-bada-boom, you are done.
The phone call thing or the US Mail thing is for old old old old old old old old people, and while they are the bread and butter of the subscription model, young people who throw digital money around like bottles in a club would part with it if given a chance as long as you give them value and an easy way to do so! I am sure Linda does amazing at her job though! :)
Also, according to data that I talk about on my bank part of my project, 45% of people haven’t written a check in years, and money orders are almost non-existent these days. I was in banking when my bank got rid of them in 2016, stating to us, “Only old people and non-homeowners get money orders. They are a time suck for us" I am not saying don’t accept them, I am merely saying don’t rely on that person to come back if you limit their options of payment.
This statememt:
This has been in the works for a while, along with other improvements to our digital presence. But it isn’t ready yet.
It’s not my business, but as a former banker, this strikes me a certain way… What’s going on? Is there like a person or people trying to sell this paper on a full e-commerce package/merchant services pack that has a 24-36 month contract, comes with a million pages explaining all the different interchange rates for accepting debit, credit, Amex, Discover, Reward cards, international credit cards, etc. and someone smooth talking all this stuff like he knows what the eff he is talking about.
They will have you sign 4-6 papers to get this thing you need for your business when I showed you in 2 minutes you can have it and screw over that salesman and do it all yourself.
Why do I know this? Because I used to be that person selling merchant services to business, and my contracts I pushed on my Bank of America clients over the course of a decade were the bane of failed businesses because they still had to pay monthly fees for equipment and software even though they went under.
Looking at you Alanberto’s and Pullaros Italian Kitchen. (Mr. Pullaro Died so he couldn’t fulfill his contract anymore, and I bitched out BofA to leave his family alone. They really loved me at work yelling at these monsters trying to hit up his family for money from a credit card machine for a business he was not at anymore because he was dead...)
Accepting payments, unless you are a storefront, does not need a POS credit card machine, a dedicated engine to accepting online payments.
A mishmash of smaller options where you only pay a small vig is the way to go. I just don’t like that it has “been in the works for a while”
It tells me there are meetings, a bunch of BS debate over is this one better because it is a cheaper fee over this one which is less per month. Dude, every salesperson who sells these products has a sales goal, including the online ones, and they don’t have your best interests at heart. Throw some simple buttons on your page and accept payments immediately.
In sales, all the negativity about not having it ready and having the door locked and all that literally drives people away, because they see a lack of self-confidence and see you seeking out empathy for the hurdles you are overcoming.
Long story short, it makes you look like a mess when you really aren’t.
One final thing: This edit was done hours after I wrote the rest. My wife had reminded me the sister paper for Deming Headlight is the Silver City Daily Press and Independent, and that is only notable, because that is the only page that blocked my wife on Facebook in the 15 years I have known her.
She is not me. In fact, she is the opposite of me. She is the nicest person in the world, and she has an amazing career which impacts thousands of people in Las Cruces. But I remember in 2013, it REALLY bugged her that she left a comment about something the SC Daily Press had posted, she got blocked as a result.
The funny thing is, she mentions she was becoming me. I was not necessarily an annoyance on social media, but talking about things matter of factly got me routinely blocked.
I turned that bluntness into a career where I write about how to more effectively handle customer service issues and other things. Go figure.
I still can’t believe she got blocked.. That being said…
I wrote this because..
I wholeheartedly support the Deming Headlight, El Defensor Chieftain, and the thousands of little newspapers across this country that I will buy when I go pee in your convenience stores, buy a Grandma’s cookie and a Red Bull on the way to my vacation destination.
I wish you the best, and in another life, I could’ve helped these papers in some way.. whether is was my sales acumen, writing ability, although I can go way long at times, or frankly, my belief in the cause for journalism at the local level. I wish I could have helped more.
Don’t overthink it. You told people your paper may die today. You asked for their money. You weren’t ready to accept it.
Remember you are now playing with house money every day you are operational. Just make sure you have an online method for the house to pay you.
James
Thenotoriousbanker@gmail.com