The Survival of a Small-Town Paper

“Every community deserves a local newspaper that covers high school sports, civic affairs, local organizations’ activities, and matters of concern to the people living there. And every town council needs an official newspaper of record, to publish its notices,” says Bob Nester, who bought the Stockbridge Town Crier in 2008 and transformed it into the Sun Times News. The weekly publication is distributed free of charge through the mail to Dexter, Chelsea, and Saline residents—and will soon add coverage of Pinckney and Milan. 

At a time when newspapers are shutting down all over the country, the Sun Times News is a remarkable success story. As the Community Guide went to press, it was about to split into separate papers for Dexter, Chelsea, and Saline.

“This way we’ll offer better coverage of local news,” explains Chuck Colby, who took over management from Nester during Covid. He expects to expand the Sun Times (as he and most readers know it) to Pinckney and Milan by next spring.

“A century or more ago, every little town in Michigan had at least one newspaper,” Nester points out. “We need them as much now as much as people did before.”

Within the past fifteen years, one-quarter of all U.S. newspapers went out of business, according to a study out of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. It reports that 2,100 of America’s 9,000 newspapers in operation since 2008 have disappeared, and 1,800 communities that had their own newspapers in 2004 now have no original reporting whatsoever, print or digital. “Many are in economically challenged rural places, but news deserts are now also invading wealthy suburbs,” the authors write.

So, what makes the Sun Times the exception to the trend?

“Bob Nester,” says Chuck Colby, who is buying the paper from his mentor.

“Chuck’s energy and enthusiasm. He’s an amazing salesman,” Nester says.

And, they agree, the paper fills a need and serves an important purpose.

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A slimmer, trimmer, Hemingway lookalike (white beard, deep tan, faded baseball cap, affinity for water sports), Nester, seventy-seven, is candid about his previous journalism experience and learning curve: “When I got into the business, I was a retired federal employee who knew nothing about running a newspaper.” His partner at the time, Wendy Wood, was a Town Crier staff member who also became his business partner. In bringing a nineteenth-century newspaper (“The name itself—Town Crier—says it all!”) into the twenty-first century, they changed its name, masthead, and coverage.

“We agreed to publish facts without bias as much as possible, and let the readers make up their own minds,” Nester says. “We offer all points of view in the letters to the editor. In my day, I’ve been called a bleeding-heart liberal and an effing nut job because of those letters, but I am neither.” One of his most successful decisions was to become newspaper of record for numerous communities. “That guaranteed a steady income.”

Nester increased the news coverage to Chelsea, Dexter, Saline, and Stockbridge, while the handful of reporters also tried to pay attention to Pinckney, Unadilla, Lyndon and Sylvan townships, and White Oak and Bunker Hill townships in Ingham County.

In 2015, the Sun Times was published weekly and delivered to 25,000 households, but Nester decided his staff was spread too thin, and concentrated coverage on Dexter, Chelsea, and Saline, with 18,000 mailings.

The old model had been based on revenue from subscribers as well as advertisers. Nester describes the new one as “local news, delivered for free through the postal system” to tight clusters of zip codes. Advertising supported all expenses.

Until Covid hit.

Nester tried to go online, promising his nine employees that if they stayed with him, he’d “make it good.” But by mid-2020, he says, he was forced to sell a rental property to fund the staff’s benefits and salaries. He thought he’d published his last edition on July 13—but then he met with Chuck Colby.

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“This is really the heart of Dexter, so it’s a great place for a newspaper headquarters,” says Colby, gesturing out the windows of the cavernous second-story room in the PNC Bank building that surveys Main St. as well as Mill Creek. The newspaper moved in as soon as the city offices moved to 4515 Broad St.

An MSU grad and Dexter resident since 1993, Colby is a larger-than-life personality with timbre in his voice and a diversified resume. Since 1992, he’s performed in the award-winning quartet Three Men and a Tenor. He was director of marketing and development for the Encore Musical Theatre Company, and director of sales for Cade Advertising.

When Covid hit, all musical performances were canceled, and Cade furloughed Colby. His career took an entirely new direction during a visit to Hell (Michigan, that is).

“I first met Bob Nester in 2015,” Colby says, leaning back in his office chair in the classic storyteller pose, hands behind his head. “In the spring of 2019, Bob and I sat down and talked for three hours about the possibility of me working for the newspaper. I told him I wasn’t ready to make the jump. But the pandemic changed everything for me, as it did for so many others. I ran into Bob again on July 26, 2020, and we agreed to talk over beer and a sandwich at the pub in Hell.”

That was when Nester confessed, “I think we’re really sunk.”

“How can I help?” Colby asked.

“Go sell ads for me.”

“I had no income and no work. It was the perfect time for me to do something different,” Colby remembers. “I asked for a list of leads.”

Within two weeks, Colby had received commitments from fifteen of the paper’s former advertisers and acquired three new ones. Impressed, Nester asked, “How would you like to run the whole thing?”

Colby agreed.

The resurrected Sun Times News reappeared in grocery stores and mailboxes on September 30, 2020, with a redesigned masthead and a new printer. “I was nervous. My wife was nervous,” Colby admits. “I worked a full year for zero dollars. We sold our house and lived on the proceeds. Fortunately, that was during Covid, and we had nothing to spend money on.”

Colby relied on several tried-and-true employees from Nester’s tenure, hired writer Doug Marrin to serve as editor, and made ambitious plans for the future.

“The business model is about to change,” he says as he supervises the last-minute details of producing entirely separate publications for Dexter, Chelsea, and Saline, and later for Milan and Pinckney.

“It makes sense,” Marrin says. “People in Saline don’t generally want to know what’s happening in Chelsea. They want news that directly affects them.”

On the horizon is another anticipated growth: Colby hopes to add three more newspapers to the chain, for Ann Arbor residents in the sending areas for the city’s three high schools.

Nester leans back in a chair in the Dexter Bakery and sighs. “I’m so incredibly fortunate that Chuck decided to ‘eat the elephant’ and come on board.” Though Colby is now in charge, every week, the former owner reviews the publication before it goes to press, troubleshooting for the staff.

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The Sun Times News has a long, illustrious, and convoluted history dating back 141 years, with big—and old—shoes to fill in the communities it now serves.

The Stockbridge Town Crier published its first issue sometime around 1882, and expanded its coverage to small surrounding communities as soon as Nester bought it. The Dexter Leader debuted in 1869, when townspeople convinced a Detroit printer to move to their village and start a newspaper. The Chelsea Standard appeared twenty years later and merged with the Chelsea Herald in 1904. The Saline Reporter was a relative latecomer, publishing its first issue in 1948.

Walter and Helen Leonard bought both the Chelsea and Dexter papers and became the last local owners before selling to Downriver Detroit–based Heritage Papers in 1995. Heritage owner Heinz Prechter also bought the Saline Reporter, the Milan News-Leader, the Manchester Enterprise, and the Ypsilanti Courier—but after his untimely death they all were sold. They passed through bankruptcy and briefly merged into a single publication before shutting down in 2015. These days, the Sun Times’ competitors are the Chelsea Guardian, the Saline Post in print and online, the Community Guide, and websites chelseaupdate.com and weloveannarbor.com (which also covers Dexter).

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As the Sun Times metamorphoses into individual publications for Dexter, Chelsea, and Saline, Colby is working on a new fee structure. He says some advertisers are interested in appearing in all publications, others just one. He is following the Observer model in one respect: “We’ll continue to mail our publication free of charge, but we’ll charge for copies picked up at local businesses.”

“Big newspapers are all struggling, and most have come under the umbrella of a big company,” he says. “But you can get more news on your watch in five minutes than some of them now provide.

“Local news is different: it really requires people to dive into the community and report on all the issues that matter to us all. We are committed to doing that.”