The Billings Times has been located at 2919 Montana Avenue since 1898. The printing business will continue operation as it has since 1891. (photo by John Warner)
by Ed Kemmick, (republished with permission)
As of today, you can add one more name to the list of roughly 2,500 American newspapers that have folded in the past 20 years.
As Publisher Scott Turner announced today on Page 1 of The Billings Times, this is the final issue of a weekly newspaper that has been published continuously since 1891.
It’s not like losing the Rocky Mountain News (Denver, 2009), but it’s still a sad occasion. I know it was a hard decision for Scott. His father, Bill Turner, moved his family from Nebraska to Billings in 1960 to work for The Times’ print shop on Montana Avenue, then ended up buying the business in 1978.
Scott worked as a delivery boy for the print shop and addressed and bagged up the newspapers every Thursday for delivery to the post office during his three years at Billings Senior High, and after some years away he went to work for his father full time in 1989. When Bill died in 2009, Scott and his brother, Craig, took over the business. Craig’s son, Kelly, joined The Times as a pressman in 1998 and now runs the printing operation, which continues to thrive in the Montana Avenue building it has occupied since 1898.
So, yes, there’s some deep history there, for the city of Billings and for Scott’s family. I started reading The Times after becoming the City Hall reporter for the Billings Gazette in 1996. Back then, the only news article in The Times was Francis “Red” Welsh’s weekly report on the City Council.
Red was one of the last old-school characters in Billings. Besides his work in print journalism, he was a widely known television personality, an insurance agent and for a while president of the Billings Brewery. I used to sit next to him at City Council meetings, vastly entertained by his running commentary on the proceedings.
I can picture him looking over his shoulder as some regular muckety-muck would approach the lectern to speak during the public comment period. “Oh, no,” Red would say in a stage whisper. “Not this blowhard again!”
In earlier days, The Times, whose motto was “Yellowstone County’s Factpaper,” carried quite a bit of news, as I was reminded earlier this year, when a former Billings resident working on a documentary about something that happened here in the 1970s asked me to do some research for him.
It turned out that The Times, not the Gazette, had the information he was looking for. Score one for the factpaper.
I thought I was through with newspapers when, in 2021, Scott asked me and local author Russell Rowland to write monthly columns for The Times. We both jumped at the chance. I liked the idea because Scott was a friend and a big supporter of Last Best News, the online newspaper I published for five years after leaving the Gazette in 2013.
Scott said in an email that “it has been a great honor and privilege — and a lot of fun —” to have published our monthly ramblings in these twilight years of The Times. I think Russell would agree that it has been an honor and privilege for us, too, and certainly lots of fun.
I had been intending to write more about the decline of newspapers, but is there anything left to say? There are countless less significant reasons for the decline, but it mostly comes down to the rise of the internet, which has been slowly slaughtering newspapers since its advent and is now wrecking the country at large.
What can we do about it, except maybe to pray? The people of Pompeii had about as much hope of containing Vesuvius.
But there are reasons to be hopeful, including the steady expansion of the Montana Free Press, an online newspaper that is based in Helena but is increasingly offering first-rate statewide coverage. Locally, Yellowstone County News, under Publisher Jonathan McNiven, is also doing well. Best of all, he runs a weekly column by my old friend and former colleague, David Crisp.
As Scott also explained in his front-page announcement, The Times, under an agreement with Yellowstone County News, will recommend that its legal advertising clients take their business over to YCN. Subscribers to The Times will also receive online issues of Yellowstone County News for the remainder of their subscription period.
Hell, I can’t resist a plug for the Gazette, too. Its parent company, Lee Enterprises, deserves little praise or pity, but the skeleton crew putting out the newspaper seven days a week still does a damned admirable job of it. And like Russell and me, they seem to think it’s lots of fun.
As for my own plans? Looks like it’s time to retire again.
