Pourovers, Patrón, and Print
In Marfa, Texas, you can (maybe) glimpse a future for independent media. By Sasha von Oldershausen/The New York Times
The Sentinel’s HQ in Marfa, Texas.
Editor’s note: We’ve been big fans of The Big Bend Sentinel since we stumbled upon it a few years ago. It’s just another reason to visit Marfa, Texas. Oh, also, their operation might be the future of media, too.
When Landrie Moore was looking for a venue for her destination wedding, she knew she wanted a space that really reflected life in this small, remote desert town.
Her guests would be coming from as far as Ecuador and England, and Ms. Moore, 35, who works for a boutique hotel firm, hoped to provide a memorable and authentic experience for those travelers. When you visit a new place, she said in a phone interview, “you want to feel like a local.”
Which is why she decided to get married mere feet from the office of The Big Bend Sentinel, the region’s oldest newspaper (where I worked as a reporter in 2014 and 2015).
Ms. Moore’s wedding, in June, was the first of five held last year in the Sentinel, a cafe and cocktail bar in the newspaper’s newly renovated office building. The space is perhaps the most visible sign that The Big Bend Sentinel is under new ownership: Maisie Crow and Max Kabat, who moved to Marfa from New York City in 2016, took over last year from Robert and Rosario Halpern, the paper’s publishers of 25 years.
“We kind of saw us in a way,” Mr. Halpern said of the couple.
“Buy a newspaper?” Mr. Kabat, 37, recalled thinking when the Halperns first approached him and Ms. Crow about a potential sale. “What are we, idiots?” Their background is in consulting and documentary filmmaking. (The New York Times is a producer of a forthcoming film by Ms. Crow.)
Since 2004, nearly 20 percent of local papers in the United States have folded or merged, according to a 2018 study by the Hussman School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina. In many cases, publishers have been replaced by a narrow network of large investment groups that have acquired hundreds of failing newspapers.
But Marfa is no ordinary town, and its newsweekly has been a pillar of the community for nearly a century—long before Marfa became cool. The Big Bend Sentinel’s pages are pasted up with major issues of the day (the death of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice, on a nearby luxury ranch, for example, and the possibility of a border wall just 60 miles away) alongside valedictorian announcements, photo spreads of homecoming events and advance coverage of the town’s many festivals.
Before Mr. Kabat and Ms. Crow (who is originally from Corpus Christi, Texas) took over, the paper ran solely on ad sales and subscriptions. “It was able to sustain itself on a shoestring, but we wanted to expand the potential,” Ms. Crow, 38, said. They hoped to bring locals closer, physically, to the institution covering their hometown.
Max Kabat and Maisie Crow, publishers of The Big Bend Sentinel.
“Buy a newspaper? What are we, idiots?”
So they bought the building previously occupied by Padre’s, a dive bar that went out of business in 2016, and before that, a funeral home, and began renovations.
“We had to sage the whole place,” said Callie Jenschke, whom the couple hired to handle interior design.
—
Continue reading at The New York Times.
ORIGINALLY POSTED ON 25 FEBRUARY 2020 ©THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY