When the Clarendon and Hedley city councils meet on the same evening in the Texas Panhandle, Roger Estlack cannot be in two places at once.
“For hard news like enterprise and accountability reporting, I’m the only full-time reporter we have,” said Estlack, publisher of The Clarendon Enterprise. “So, I have to pick where I’m going and follow up after the fact for the meeting I can’t personally attend. It’s not ideal, but we’ve been making it work for a long time.”
A 2025 study by Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack found that more than one-third of U.S. counties lacked the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist, illustrating how thinly reporting resources are stretched nationwide.
The Enterprise has chronicled life in Clarendon, Texas, since 1878. Today, Estlack runs the weekly newspaper with a familiar team: his daughter Elaina and his wife and co-owner, Ashlee.
In a town of approximately 1,800 residents, keeping the newspaper alive requires more than finding new ways to sell advertising. Estlack has developed special publications, community guides and advertising packages across print and digital platforms. He and Ashlee have even expanded into neighboring counties by acquiring another rural newspaper.
But when asked what the Enterprise really needs to remain financially sustainable, Estlack's answer reaches beyond the newsroom.
“What we really need to be financially sustainable is a growing town with new businesses and new readers,” he said. “We’re seeing some of that, but we need more and that requires boosting rural development in general.”
His predicament exposes a fundamental challenge for rural journalism: a newspaper’s survival may depend as much on the economic vitality of its community as on the ingenuity of its publisher.
Nearly a decade of experimentation has led Dana Coester, founder and executive director of 100 Days in Appalachia, to a similarly unsettling conclusion.
“There has been no magic bullet, and I no longer think it’s a situation of ‘innovate harder,’” she said.
Coester has tested newsletters, paywalls, social video, merchandise, consulting, training and events. Yet amid changing technology, distribution platforms and economic pressures, she questions whether journalism currently has a viable business model at all. At the least, it challenges the assumption that innovation alone can rescue rural journalism.
Clarendon sits approximately 60 miles southeast of Amarillo, in a county where cattle ranching, farming, Clarendon College and highway commerce sustain much of the economy. Estlack describes a community that has experienced downtown revitalization alongside business closures and drought-related declines in tourism.
“We have lost some of our home-owned businesses in the last 30 years — a local car dealership and a family-owned grocery store were particularly tough losses for the community,” he said.
As traditional retail advertising declined, the Enterprise developed welcome guides, football posters and other special publications to generate revenue.
In December 2025, Roger and Ashlee acquired the neighboring Red River Sun, subsequently rebranded as the Greenbelt Intrepid, extending their reporting operation into three additional counties.
“Ultimately, we didn’t want to see our neighboring counties become a news desert,” Estlack said.
The concern is increasingly justified. Northwestern University’s Medill School reported in October that 170 newspapers had closed or merged over the preceding year, many in rural communities. The number of U.S. counties without a locally based professional news source rose to 238.
The acquisition also created opportunities to share resources, although staffing remains difficult.
“Money. It’s that simple really,” he said when asked about his greatest challenge. “It’s hard to compete with better paying opportunities for qualified people, especially when you’re a small business that can’t offer health insurance.”
In the Appalachian Mountains, Allegheny Mountain Radio faces a different financial crisis.
The community-radio network serves Pocahontas County, West Virginia, and Bath and Highland counties in Virginia, where mountain roads complicate travel and cellular coverage remains limited.
Scott Smith, general manager at Allegheny Mountain Radio, said the organization historically relied on donations, underwriting and Community Service Grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Following Congress’ July 2025 rescission of federal public broadcasting funding, the network faced the loss of grants Smith says previously supplied roughly 60% to 65% of its income.
“We are currently working to find ways to replace that, though that is difficult in an area which is economically challenged, and where new businesses are generally in short supply,” he said.
The station is seeking more donations, underwriting and grants, but Smith says its aging population presents another obstacle: replacing longtime donors and recruiting employees as people leave.
Both organizations face a problem that business innovation alone cannot solve: limited local economic resources constrain their ability to replace lost revenue.
Experimenting without a safety net
When 100 Days in Appalachia emerged after the 2016 presidential election, its founders wanted to challenge reductive national portrayals of the region. The collaborative digital outlet sought to bring Appalachian perspectives to national and international audiences while demonstrating that the region’s experiences reflected broader American challenges.
Its journalism has examined data-center development in West Virginia through a documentary collaboration with More Perfect Union. Other reporting has explored the environmental legacy of fossil-fuel extraction along the Ohio River.
But producing ambitious journalism has not produced predictable revenue.
“I just don’t think media in general has a viable business model right now,” Coester said.
The organization has experimented with newsletters, paywalls, social video, merchandise, consulting, training and convenings. Its editorial operation relies on grants, special projects, freelancers and part-time editors rather than maintaining a permanently staffed conventional newsroom.
That flexibility has become a survival strategy. The organization expands when funding supports larger projects and contracts when resources are scarce, avoiding substantial fixed overhead. One team member described the operation as “Three possums in a trenchcoat!”
But Coester argues that keeping an organization alive requires more than balancing its finances. “It is not just about having economic sustainability, it is also about the human sustainability,” she said.
That concern shapes the newsroom’s approach to growth. Rather than continuously adding permanent expenses, it has invested in collaborations, documentary production, workshops and in-person gatherings designed to reach younger Appalachians.
One planned collaboration would transform an abandoned Dollar General store into a multimedia installation exploring artificial intelligence, surveillance and technology’s influence on rural communities. The strategy reflects a willingness to rethink what journalism looks like and where audiences encounter it. Whether those relationships eventually produce sufficient revenue remains an open question.
After years of experimenting with emerging platforms, the organization has also chosen not to pursue AI-driven production experiments for now. Instead, it is reporting on the technology’s consequences while investing in face-to-face engagement.
For Coester, survival has meant adapting the operation to the resources available without abandoning its mission. “We’re still here,” she said.
What philanthropy can — and cannot — do
Chelsea Naughton, narrative and communications coordinator at Appalachia Funders Network, sees similar challenges from the funding side. The network’s Central Appalachia Rural News Fund supports eight newsrooms through grants, technical assistance and business-development guidance.
First-year grants help participating organizations strengthen editorial and business staffing. Additional funding is intended to support recurring revenue through advertising, underwriting and other investments. But Naughton cautions against treating philanthropy as a permanent solution.
“There isn’t enough philanthropic capital to rebuild and sustain a local news ecosystem,” she said.
The goal is to help newsrooms develop the capacity to support themselves rather than depend indefinitely on grants. Yet the region’s limited philanthropic resources and economic challenges complicate that ambition. The program is still too new to establish whether its investments will lead to lasting financial stability.
For rural publishers, the distinction is critical. A grant can help pay for reporting or strengthen business operations, but it cannot necessarily create the local economic activity needed to sustain either.
The organizations' revenue strategies differ. Estlack is diversifying a longstanding newspaper business. Smith is searching for replacement funding for community radio. Coester is continually adapting the structure and activities of a digital journalism project.
Naughton’s fund offers resources to strengthen rural newsrooms while acknowledging that philanthropy alone cannot sustain them. None of these approaches guarantees stability.
The deeper challenge is whether communities with limited economic resources can support the institutions providing their news, accountability reporting and civic information. For Estlack, the stakes extend beyond the newspaper’s financial survival.
“The newspaper is an honest recording of everything that happens in a town preserved on paper,” he said. “It’s a lasting source that will outlive us all.”
The Enterprise has preserved Clarendon’s history for nearly 150 years, creating a record that future generations can consult to understand the people and decisions that shaped their community. “If we disappear, that story ends, and posterity will be left to wonder about the past,” he concluded.
Taayoo Murray is a New York City-based journalist who covers health, wellness and parenting. She is the founder of The Care Capitalist, which convenes off-the-record rooms to think through healthcare’s hardest questions. She welcomes emails at taayoo_murray@yahoo.com.
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