Skip to main content

From surviving to thriving

Pate remakes a struggling newspaper into a prosperous seven-town media company 

By DONNIS BAGGETT

Texas Press Association

TIMPSON, Texas — The ink was barely dry on Chad Pate’s degree in English from Stephen F. Austin State University when the phone rang in December.

On the line were Paul Smith, chairman of the board of the Timpson Chamber of Commerce, and his wife Debra Smith, who serves as mayor of Timpson. They told Pate the 130-year-old Timpson and Tenaha News was about to close its doors unless someone stepped up to buy it. And they told him he was the hometown boy to do so.

Their plea resonated with Pate, who had been looking forward to a mid-life career change to teaching after a stressful real estate investment job that had led to an early heart attack. But he couldn’t bear the idea of his hometown being without a newspaper. Next thing he knew, he was a fledgling newspaperman instead of a rookie teacher.

“Being my hometown, I didn’t really want to be the guy to let the paper, the oldest business in town, go out of business after 130 years,” he said.

Pate knew he needed to move quickly to turn around the newspaper’s financial fortunes.

“I had to make it work. It had to happen… So I started thinking: Timpson and Tenaha, there wasn’t enough business between the two to make it work.” 

But opportunity was knocking in all directions — other nearby communities with small businesses and no newspapers of their own. He decided to cover seven towns in four counties, with a page of news and advertising devoted to each.

“The towns that we’re covering are left out of the coverage from the larger papers,” he said. “It so happened that this little rural area is in a little triangle between Carthage, Center and Nacogdoches. Most of the towns are about eight miles apart. High school football is huge. Some of the towns are rivals, and they wouldn’t want a paper that’s named after the other town. I thought, ‘I have to change the name of this paper.’”

With a page of news dedicated each week to Center, Garrison, Gary, Joaquin, Mount Enterprise, Tenaha and Timpson, Pate decided to rename the paper to honor each market’s individual identity. He settled on “Our Town Times.” His objective was simultaneously simple and complex: “Going into towns where we had not been before and making the people take ownership of it themselves.”

“I may be the owner of the paper, but it’s still the people’s paper,” he said. 

“The people just welcomed us like Santa Claus. They were just so happy to have their kids in the paper and their things being covered. The most rewarding thing to me was to go out and get people to advertise and they’d come in and pay early and say they’ve been getting response.”

Pate knew that Our Town Times —now referred to as OTT by staffers and readers alike — needed an online presence as well as a print one. He launched a website, a Facebook page, even an app. The paper’s motto: “Seven Towns. One newspaper.”

“I was not afraid to take chances. I had to do something,” he said. “What I learned from launching the website was that the businesses in the larger towns...they only allotted so much of their budget for print. So when I had a website available, I had people call and double their advertising budget with us.”

Pate said he draws ideas and encouragement from fellow TPA members.

“What really encouraged me...was being at the Midwinter Conference and hearing the speaker say that publishers are still looking for the answer...looking for what’s going to make the difference for Texas papers. I came away saying I want to find what that is.”

Less than eight months after Pate bought it, the paper has gone from 12 pages a week to 22 and circulation is growing by 20 to 30 subscriptions per week. Most importantly, finances are now in the black.

Pate and his staff gather each morning for prayer.

“We run this as a Christian business,” he said. “We want the paper to be a ministry to our community...Whatever service they need, it’s really important for us to do that.” 

“The paper focuses on a lot of positive stories out of communities,” Pate said, stressing that all the news is hyperlocal. “We really looked for these things. That really made a difference for us.” He said readers’ letters to the editor reflect that the content is appreciated.

Pate said he doesn’t believe print is dead, but “there is a different outreach now.”

“I believe it is very important to stop referring to OTT as ‘your paper.’ We’re more than a paper now. We’re online, we’re an e-edition, we’re a mobile app. These dated terms like ‘my paper,’ I think it does do us harm.”

OTT uses social media like a billboard or radio spot, driving traffic to the paper’s website, which sometimes has 7,000 to 8,000 hits a day. “It works,” Pate said. “We have a huge following on our social media — not just our stories, but our ads, too.”

What advice would Pate offer to other publishers struggling to make their business plans?

First, he said, success requires investment in software, marketing, even a nicer office.

“I needed to represent success myself. Why would someone spend a couple of thousand dollars a month with us on advertising if our business didn’t look like it was successful? Invest in what you want everyone else to invest in.”

Smith, the chamber of commerce chairman, said Pate was what the newspaper — and the town — needed. “He’s done a very, very good job with it…He took something that was non-profitable and got it back on its feet…

“I did not want to lose our hometown paper,” Smith said. “I felt like if we had lost our hometown paper, Timpson would have taken a giant step backwards.”