Owned by a journalism professor, Marion County Record adheres to traditional publishing
Teri Saylor
Special to Publishers' Auxiliary
Jul 1, 2021
While most of the world was sequestered at home riding out the COVID-19 pandemic, Eric Meyer hunkered down, too. But even as the economy came to a grinding halt, he didn’t stop working. Rather, he picked up the pace.
Meyer, 67, who splits his time teaching journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with his duties as publisher of the Marion (Kansas) County Record, moved his classes online and returned home, where he settled in to publishing his newspaper full time.
Meyer strives for excellence in everything he does. His university bio page paints a picture of accomplishment, crediting the Marion County Record with 45 newspaper awards and the title of Kansas’ best mid-size non-daily for both news and advertising in 2018.
For Meyer, owning and publishing a newspaper is not a job but a calling. In addition to the Marion County Record, he owns and publishes the Hillsboro (Kansas) Star-Journal and the Peabody (Kansas) Gazette-Bulletin under the Hoch Publishing banner. During the pandemic, he combined the Star-Journal and Gazette-Bulletin into a single publication. The Marion County Record’s circulation is 2,200. The Star-Journal and Gazette-Bulletin’s combined circulation is around 1,700.
The first issue of the newspaper that would eventually become the Marion County Record rolled off the press on September 24, 1869. Founding editor and publisher A.W. Robinson named the paper The Western News. It became the Marion County Record in 1871. The storied Hoch family in Kansas politics bought the newspaper in 1874 and kept it for 124 years. E.W. Hoch served two terms in the Kansas legislature and was governor from 1905 to 1909. His son, Homer Hoch, a lawyer, served in Congress from 1919 to 1933 and as a justice of the Kansas Supreme Court from 1938 until his death in 1949. E.W.’s other son, Wharton Hoch, was the newspaper’s editor when Eric’s father, Bill Meyer, joined the team as associate editor. Bill Meyer was promoted to editor when Wharton Hoch died in 1967. The newspaper was part of the Hoch estate, where it sat for almost 30 years as Bill Meyer continued to work as editor. In 1998, Bill Meyer and his wife, Joan, along with their son, Eric, bought the Marion County Record from the Hoch estate.
Bill Meyer died in 2006. Joan Meyer, who continues to compile the Record’s popular “Memories” column, is the newspaper’s most senior staff member. She has worked at the Record for more than 50 years.
“My mother is 96,” Eric Meyer said. “She has spent every Saturday going through microfilm and writing that column, which is one the newspaper’s most popular features.”
Eric, who holds a bachelor of science degree in journalism from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree in journalism from Marquette University, now serves as president of Hoch Publishing. He has also worked as an editor at the Milwaukee Journal and as publisher of the American Journalism Review/NewsLink website.
Since taking over the Record’s reins, Eric has worked hard to keep the newspaper independent from group ownership while finding ways to make it stand out from other newspapers and from the glut of information flooding the online world, including social media. He advocates for steering clear of routine coverage, like recaps of sports events and government meetings, and he avoids publishing press releases, believing that rather than relying on printing routine information that is readily available online, newspapers can better serve their readers by publishing unique information and articles.
“The secret to journalism these days is to find stories that surprise people and articles that provide unexpected nuggets of information,” he said in a recent Zoom call. “You can’t just cover routine matters anymore. If you focus on the element of surprise, people will read your articles. Keep surprising and delighting readers, and they will subscribe, and as more subscribe, the more ads you’ll sell.”
While Eric invests valuable resources in news coverage and doesn’t skimp for the sake of the bottom line, he admits the hiring landscape is sparse.
“Our biggest challenge is finding employees,” he said. “Particularly the fine young journalism graduates like those I teach.”
Eric’s students, most of whom grew up in the Chicago suburbs, depend on loans to make a college education affordable. Newspaper work often doesn’t offer enough compensation to pay back those loans. And small communities don’t shine as brightly as big city lights.
“We are a small town where the last convenience store closes at 11 p.m. There’s no McDonald’s and no coffee shops,” he said. “Many kids won’t come here unless they grew up in a small town.”
He’s turning to seeking new employees with two-year degrees from local colleges and wearing his professor hat to help fill in any educational gaps.
Eric describes his ideal reporter as curious and eager to be the first to know something.
“These are traits I’ve noticed in good reporters over the years among my students, and it takes about a week and a half to figure out who’s got it and who doesn’t,” he said. “The fundamentals of writing, grammar and punctuation are teachable, but what I can’t teach is curiosity. I can’t teach the desire to inform an audience, and I can’t teach anyone to care about the community where they live.”
As a journalism professor, Eric constantly advocates for careers in community journalism.
“Many of my students aspire to jobs such as working the breaking news desk at a busy metro daily, but I tell them if they do that, they will be covering fires and traffic accidents for the rest of their lives,” he said. “At community newspapers, when we hire a new reporter, from day one, they are going to be covering the mayor, local crime and top stories in the community.”
Currently, Eric has 11 employees on his staff. Some are part time, and others are full time. Most of them are reporters.
“We do have a profit-sharing plan, and if we make money at the end of the year after expenses, we share it with the employees,” he said. “I didn’t buy the newspaper because I wanted to make money; I bought it because I love this town. I grew up here.”
He doesn’t take a salary, and he has not drawn a salary or dividend since he bought the newspaper, he said. He has retired from previous jobs, and he’s a full-time tenured university professor. He doesn’t entertain the thought of selling the newspaper or its building, even though the courthouse across the street is looking to expand and has been eyeing the structure.
Marion County, situated near the center of Kansas and about a hour north of Wichita, is not affluent, but it has plenty of interesting characteristics. The Marion reservoir and Marion Lake offer outdoor recreation. St. John Nepomucene Catholic Church honors Father Emil Kapaun of the Marion Diocese, a chaplain in the Korean War who was a prisoner of war and is now on the path to canonization. A cemetery marks the remnants of Gnadenau, a communal village of Mennonite immigrants from Russia. And while the village is a ghost town, the Mennonite culture lives on through Tabor College, currently owned and operated by the Mennonite Brethren Church.
The county also has its share of problems, including methamphetamine addictions, the lack of a skilled work force, and a sluggish population, which was 11,964 in 2019, according to the U.S. Census.
While the Marion County Record has a solid online presence and an active Facebook page with 2,115 likes, Eric much prefers print and has no intention of ever publishing news online only. With limited resources, he chooses to focus on reporting the news and making a difference.
Eric views newspapers as mirrors to the communities they serve.
“Just like you hold up a mirror, the community newspaper can reveal that you are the fairest of them all, or if you need to lose 20 pounds,” he said. “As a newspaper, we reflect the good and the non-so-good about our communities.”
Teri Saylor is a writer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Contact her at terisaylor@hotmail.com
