Cali O’Hare works in a building that once housed several reporters. Photo by Melodie Edwards

The Pinedale Roundup newspaper office is easy to find. It’s right off the main drag in downtown Pinedale, Wyoming, a town famous for its Green River Rendezvous, and as a gateway to the Wind River Range. It’s a good size space, well kept and professional with a prominent sign across the front. Inside, there’s a customer service office, a long carpeted hallway with lots of offices and conference spaces. But these days, all of those rooms, they’re empty. The place feels a little haunted by the ghosts of reporters past. 

Except way down in the newsroom one woman is toiling away to make sure this 120-year-old legacy newspaper still goes to press. 

“Today is my deadline day,” Editor Cali O’Hare says. “I've got four pages left that I'm working on building before our deadline here. The Commissioner's meeting starts here at nine, so we'll probably join that remotely and listen in and I'll record it since I can't be there right now. And then at 10, I have some of the folks from the Little League coming over, because of course now I'm a sports reporter, too.”

Across the hall, in one of the empty rooms, Cali O’Hare sets up a laptop to record the county commissioners meeting. She can’t be everywhere at once. She’ll have to listen to it later to see if any big decisions were made. She used to have a reporter who attended these meetings in person. When she was hired on a couple years ago, Cali had two reporters under her. But last winter, her publisher, News Media Corporation, laid off both of them. Now she runs this paper alone. Rural newspapers across the country are getting consolidated by corporate media behemoths like this one. But the problem of disappearing local news is much bigger than corporate consolidation; nationally, 2,100 newspapers shut down since 2004, and 57 percent of newsroom staff have been laid off. News deserts are spreading across rural America. And in Wyoming, they’re drying up fast too. 

“The gist of what a news desert is, is not having access to news to make you feel like you are vital to the social fabric of that county or the town,” says Cindy Price Schultz, the former head of the University of Wyoming’s school of journalism. 

So yeah, Cali is doing everything she can to keep this paper from becoming what’s now being termed a “ghost paper.” You’ve probably seen one like this. Maybe your own hometown paper is even ghosting. Here’s how Steve Waldman, the director of the advocacy group Rebuild Local News, defines it:

“It's still printing. It still has words and some pictures but it’s cut way back on local reporting. It's filling the pages with national stories and wire services and things like that. So it looks like a newspaper, but it is no longer functionally covering the community,” Steve says.

But even as hard as Cali works to keep this paper afloat, things inevitably slip through the cracks. Like recently, major news hit the community. She regrets not being the first reporter on the story.

“We've missed a couple of stories in recent weeks that I think we should have broken,” she says.

“Can you give me an example?” I ask.

“I sure could. The wolf being brought into the Green River Bar in Daniel.” 

In fact, if you listened to our last episode, “Boys, Booze and Wolves,” you know all about it. Today the story of one rural newspaper editor as she fights against all odds to protect good journalism in her small town.

Go West, Young Journalist

Cali fell madly in love with journalism at a young age.

“When I got into high school, actually, I became the editor of our high school newspaper and the yearbook,” she says.

In college back in South Carolina, she pursued journalism, graphic design, photography…

“I always loved all of the elements separately that make up journalism. And then when I kind of figured out that you could put all that together, I was like this is it.”

After she graduated, she started applying for jobs out west. 

“I wanted to come out west,” she says.  “I've always really loved nature and being close to it. I was drawn to Wyoming, and ended up applying for a job at the Rawlins Daily Times down in Carbon County. I was still a senior and I got the job. So the day after I graduated, I drove my U-Haul 2,000 miles across the country.”

Cali ended up working as a journalist in Rawlins for ten years, and that gave her an up close view of the first paper she’d witness go from thriving to barely surviving.

They had the press in-house. We had a mailroom crew to do all the stuffing. We had two press operators and then their assistants. We had a dedicated photographer whose position I later acquired after he left. We had a dedicated editor and then we had four newspaper reporters. And we were five days a week.”

Even though she was barely out of college, Cali worked at the newspaper as the assistant editor, paginator, and photographer for two years. Then it got bought out by Adams Publishing Group and the vibe of the organization started to change.

“To see it go from being the Rawlins Daily Times and from being an award-winning paper and to see it now, it makes me so sad. It's such a fall from grace. Really, that can only be chalked up to the ownership and their lack of willingness to invest in employees and in the staff.”

Just like the Pinedale Roundup, the company left one editor to run the paper by himself in a giant empty building. Adams Publishing Group now owns one of the largest papers in the state, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, plus the Laramie Boomerang and the Rock Springs Miner. All three have radically reduced their staff since getting bought out. That’s just in Wyoming. Across 19 states, the company owns some 127 newspapers and magazines, lots of them in the Rocky Mountains, 23 in MT, 18 in ID, 7 in Washington. Maybe you’re wondering why corporations even bother buying up all these little newspapers.

Cindy, the journalism professor at UW, says when they buy in bulk, it makes it worth their while. But only if they cut way back on staff, sometimes leaving very green reporters to run the show.

“It's really all based on money,” Cindy says. “Because it costs money to have a person who is higher up in the chain of management, then they get more money. So if it's cheaper to hire just a reporter, than it is to have an editor, then that reporter, maybe really new out of college and doesn't really know how to edit themselves.”

Cindy rememberswhen these consolidations started. Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to deregulate the media industry in hopes of increasing competition in the market. But that’s not what happened. Senator John McCain of Arizona voted against it.

“He saw in the future, how things would consolidate, because there was a limit on the number of stations that you could own or that a TV station could own a newspaper. There were limits on that. Well, they took away those limits. Now you see really big companies, like say, Townsquare Media, or Clear Channel on the broadcasting side, or you'll see some other ones like Gannett and Lee and some other very large newspaper groups, but they own each other too. Instead of becoming news, which was defended by the First Amendment of the Constitution, and the freedom of the press and the free speech, all of those things that we hold dear in the United States, it's becoming a commodity.”

When the internet came along, small town papers started selling off to these companies because their business model wasn’t workable anymore. Here’s Steve with Rebuild Local News.

“So all the classified sections of newspapers started to disappear or get very thin because the money went to the job websites and the realtor websites and the auto buying websites, all those things like that,” Steve says. “Then on top of that, Google and Facebook came along and just became this very appealing venue for businesses to advertise there instead of local media. So in some ways, the business crisis was not so much that the internet drew away the readers. It's that the internet drew away the advertisers and it just knocked the legs out of the business models.”

Steve says media corporations swept in and gobbled up papers, cutting costs and thinning out their newsrooms so they could still profit off them.

“ If you cut costs enough and you thin out your newsroom enough, you can get your costs down enough where you can still make a profit based on the legacy recurring revenue from advertising and subscribers. So as a short-term strategy, you can still make some money. In the long run. It's not going to work because you're basically asking residents to pay more and more for subscriptions at the time that you're making your product worse and worse. Charging more for a worse product is not usually a good business strategy.”

Sure, some newspapers have survived this predatory invasion and stayed independent. But Cindy says, sadly, that generation of journalists is aging.

“Some journalists who are running a newspaper can't get someone else to take over for them when they are trying to retire. that has become an issue in many parts of the U.S., especially more rural areas where maybe the money that you can make as an editor of a paper isn't enough to live in that community. You couldn't even rent an apartment, hardly. Several of the mountain towns in this state are very expensive. If you're not even making enough money, you can hardly pay rent, is that a place that you're going to get somebody else to be able to live there? It's like we can't get a human that wants to take over. That's really unfortunate for the communities and for the future of journalism in those areas,” Cindy says. 

The consequences of this news desert couldn’t be more serious.

“The collapse of local news in Wyoming and the rest of the country really has profound negative impacts on communities,” Steve says. “Direct effects are things like, literally, people don't have the information they need to decide who to vote for, or to know what's going on at their schools, or to hold  the government accountable. We know from studies and our own eyes that when there's less local reporting, there's less accountability and there's more corruption and there's worse city services. There was even a study that said in areas that you had less local news, you had lower bond ratings and higher taxes because there was less accountability and just more inefficiency.”

He says where that local news used to fill a big need, now there’s often a gaping hole.

“When local news contracts, it creates a vacuum,” Steve says. “It's an information vacuum. The vacuum is filled by national media and social media. National media tends to be more partisan.  So the contraction of local news leads to more polarization, more people demonizing each other. More of the kind of nastiness and division that you see from very highly opinionated national media.”

That nastiness is something Cali would eventually witness personally. 

The Dream Job

After getting laid off from the Rawlins newspaper, she got a job at a TV station in Rawlins and worked as a reporter there for a few years but always dreamed of returning to print. Her partner’s family lived a couple hundred miles north in Pinedale and every time she visited she read the two competing local papers there and was super impressed with the caliber of their reporting. 

“When I saw this opening, I knew for sure that these were people that I wanted to work with, these were journalists that I respected, that I still respect,” Cali says.

She got hired on as the Pinedale Roundup editor-in-chief. It was her dream job. For a few months anyway. Now those two local papers were owned by News Media Corporation, a giant media company that owns 16 papers in Wyoming and over 150 news organizations in five states. But then the company decided to scrap the Sublette County Examiner – even though it eliminated the kind of healthy competition that leads to rigorous journalism

“We ended up having to take two big papers and reduce them to 20 pages and that is so hard and it feels like such a disservice to our community because they are used to and they deserve high caliber news.”

But Cali was thrilled to work with the former Sublette County Examiner editor, Joy. It was a lot of work but she had great help.

“Robert was a sports reporter, photographer, and he also covered five of ten local government meetings. Joy covered the other five. She was a veteran news reporter. She'd been with the organization for 15 years,” Cali says.

Cali’s publisher, Rob, called her up and said he was laying off Joy. Cali fought for her and Joy was able to stay on. At least, temporarily. It didn’t make sense to Cali why the company kept chopping away at the paper. She couldn’t see anything in the Roundup’s books to justify these radical cuts.

“These reporters probably could have been paid more and what they deserve. In the short two years I've been here, we have grown subscriptions by 77%. Our ad revenue continues to go up.  Even in these last 20 weeks that I've been doing it all on my own, which I fully expected to lose people, we've only lost two subscribers. And we've gained many.”

Then in November 2023, the company transitioned her sports reporter to another paper in Torrington across the state. For a few weeks, Cali and Joy held down the fort.

“It was about two months later that Rob came back over, and he flew over, so we were like, ‘Oh, something's going on.’ He laid off Joy,” says Cali. “He said that there were dire budget cuts throughout the company, company-wide. Thirteen positions were cut across the company.”

Unfortunately, I can’t provide  more insight into News Media’s financial troubles. I reached out to them numerous times for comment. Radio silence. But what is clear is that even though the Roundup appeared to be doing fine financially, the company itself was not. This is often a reason corporations invest in rural papers – to bail themselves out. Steve says his organization has noticed some trends.

“The ones that seem to be hurting the most are the chains that either had big mergers that were financed with debt or the chains that are owned by hedge funds and private equity firms where they're sucking the money back to the home office,” he says.

None of the local papers in Wyoming are owned by hedge funds, but the Casper Star Tribune, once the state’s largest daily paper, was bought out by Lee Enterprises, a publicly-traded company, back in 2002. Cindy says that’s really hurt Wyoming’s news environment.

“Wyoming is a news desert for daily news in any kind of print format because the last one to have a seven days a week paper was Casper, and it no longer does seven days a week. So many of the things that used to be daily papers are now maybe five days a week or every other day,” says Cindy.

Wyoming’s news environment is actually considered one of the strongest in the American West since it still technically has a newspaper in every county – even if they are ghosting. But other states aren’t so lucky: Colorado, Utah, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico all have counties without a single paper. Steve says when you look at the scope there’s an antitrust case that the federal government should be making since these corporate consolidations of local news are harming communities.

“Our world would look a little bit different if the department of justice or the federal trade commission had blocked some of the acquisitions of newspaper chains by hedge funds,” Steve says.

Cali’s publisher Rob reassured her that she’d get help from the sister papers in the state. But those editors are working with skeleton crews too and so she’s basically alone. Not only that, but she also didn’t get a raise, even though she now has to do the work of three people.

“To be clear, I am making what I was hired on to make – $41,000 a year – and I do not have any of the team that I have had when I was hired and I have all of their responsibilities and my health insurance premiums have gone up.”

She earns every dime of that $41,000.

“ I do all the social media management. I do all the website management. I pay the bills to keep the lights on and the rent, the gas, the trash. I haul the recycling. I vacuum. Answer phones. Photographer.”

Her former colleague Joy still lives in town since her partner works on a local ranch.

“She's trying to navigate how to not be a journalist anymore,” Cali says. “You imagine having to stop that and everything that you're in the middle of covering? I've caught her at some of these meetings with the newspaper reporter notebook in her hand, taking notes because she just can't shake it, and I wouldn't be able to either.”

Cali didn’t want this historic old newspaper to fold so she kept running it all alone.

“The buck stops with me. I'm responsible for everything,” she says.

But she had no idea what was headed straight for her. For a few weeks after her reporters left, she was thinking, ‘Okay, maybe I can manage this.’ She shows me her stack of newspapers she’s pumped out since then.

“These ones are the ones that I've put out on my own since all my staff was eliminated. And so you can see that I had one, two (and that was kind of a big story), three (and that was a big story), four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. So my ninth story, April 11, is when that happened.

What happened was that a man had run over a wolf with his snowmobile and brought it injured and muzzled with duct tape into a local bar. Like everybody else, Cali heard the news on the radio. It was her beat but Cali didn’t get to break the story.

Cali had only been running the paper alone for nine issues when the wolf story broke out. Photo by Caitlin Tan

The Wolf Story

At first, the community just assumed Cali wouldn’t cover the wolf story at all.

“I was hearing stuff from folks who were saying, ‘Oh, the Roundup's not going to touch this. The Roundup's not going to have anything to do with this because it's such a hot button issue.’”

But they didn’t know her very well, did they?

“Now we've covered it, and we've covered it in great detail, and I've been boots on the ground for that. But I sure would have loved to have had a staff working on other stuff, because that took so much away from me,” Cali says.

She really would have appreciated having an editor, for one thing.

“It does make me nervous not having another set of eyes reading over my stuff so I tend to read over it until I'm cross eyed.”

She especially needed an editor because the story got personal. Her longtime partner grew up with Cody Roberts, the snowmobiler who ran over the wolf. He fought fires with Cody and considered him a pretty close friend.

“It has been a painful process of having to reckon with these people not being who we were as not who we thought they were,” she says. “Also, having to kind of grieve those losses and those friendships while still trying to be as objective as I possibly can in writing it, in covering it, and in covering all sides of it.”

But even with all that baggage, Cali didn’t flinch. She kept covering the twists and turns of the story – like when a video of the wolf in the bar surfaced, then global outrage hit social media full force. Cali’s community didn’t appreciate her tough journalistic chops though. She started getting pushback. 

“The county treasurer asked me to stop the coverage of the wolf. An employee for the road and bridge department, Robert Binning, was saying that I'm a bitch on a witch hunt for a man's family. It couldn't be further from the truth. I have so much empathy for his family and his friends, including my partner, who's devastated by something like this happening.”

Locals even stopped her in the aisles of the grocery store to berate her. 

“ I find the best thing to do is to pull out my mic and ask them if they're willing to do an interview with me right then and there. And they're not interested in doing that.”

Through it all, Cali kept her eye on the goal.

“My agenda is always the same. It's to gather all the facts that I possibly can and present them in an unbiased and objective way and hope that the readers or the listeners  walk away with enough information to come to their own conclusion about what’s impacting them in their own community.”

Every good journalist knows that she’s doing her job when both sides of the debate take issue with your coverage.

“I personally have been threatened by animal advocates and locals alike for my coverage of this.  The locals think that I'm too much on the animal advocate side and the animal advocates think I empathize too much with the local people in the community,” Cali says.

Then, that spring, animal rights protestors came to town as part of a cross-country motorcycle rally called Hogs for Hope. 

The Motorcycle Rally

It immediately heightened all the tensions in the community. For one thing, that day, a protester in tears came walking into town carrying a dead coyote she said she found left on the street. 

“A coyote with a bullet wound and had electrical tape around its mouth was put on display for someone to find,” Cali says. “In response to the protest coming through about the wolf that they did this and the sheriff's office is not entirely sure who did it.”

At a motocycle rally, an animal rights advocate says she found a dead coyote with its mouth taped shut like the wolves had been. Photo by Caitlin Tan

By the time Cali got to the protest, it was a media frenzy

“There were so many other journalists out on the ground that day too and we documented everything so thoroughly,” she recalls. “I was doing an interview with two ladies who had joined the ride from California and, at the time we started the interview right in front of the Green River Bar. Within three minutes, we were completely surrounded by local folks in a semicircle around us who were trying to interrupt the interview. They had set off their car alarms. So it was just constant honking in the background.”

She tried to carry on with her interview but was interrupted again by a woman who said she disagreed with the interview. Cali asked her to leave but she wouldn’t.

“I said, ‘Okay, then you're going to be a part of the interview. Go ahead and state your name and this and that.’ She then came to me over the weekend, sent me an email and said that she comes from old school journalism where they would verify their facts or their quotes with their sources before publication and she did not give me permission to use anything from the interview we did unless she read it first and approved of it. I consider myself to be an old school journalist, and I don't know a single one who is going to sit there and say, ‘Well, you just check those quotes in your Watergate papers to make sure that that's accurate.’ So I told her, ‘The good news is that everything is recorded these days and verbatim.’ I think that that probably didn't help to reassure her because she knew that she had said some things she probably shouldn't have and was trying to backtrack on it,” Cali says.

“Are you feeling safe in your community?” I ask her.

“Yeah, but I always am carrying on me,” Cali says. “I went to that protest with a gun on my hip, a knife in my pocket, and armed with my camera and I can show you the picture. I had a kid push the lens of my camera into my face because someone was trying to haul off that coyote when I was trying to take pictures of who was hauling it off. You can actually see in this photo. This is not a filter that I put around my lens. This was a guy's hand hitting my lens, trying to block me from showing this woman putting that coyote in the back of her truck.  So there's been some physical altercations. I've been screamed at, I've been called every name in the book. During one of the interviews, some guy interrupted and was saying things like, I looked like I'd been hit by a car, and just really like strange treatment from grown adult men in their fifties and sixties.”

“These are locals?” I ask.

“Yeah, these are locals.”

Locals Cali knows and likes under most circumstances. It wasn’t like the other news in the community just stopped so she could focus exclusively on this wolf incident. Around the same time, a victim of sexual abuse came forward to accuse a local Sunday school teacher of assault. Keisha’s testimony rocked the community.

“When that came out, that completely changed how Keisha was being treated in this community. She had had people who had taken her assaulter's side, and who read that article, read her victim impact statement that was included in that article, and sought her out to apologize for having taken Robert's side,” Cali says.

The Little Stories Matter Too

But it’s not just those big stories that matter to a small town publisher. Cali says there are so many little stories that serve as a glue to keep a community united.

“From helping you reunite with your missing dog to your kid's dance recital, to the Big Piney football team being the state champions, to breaking ground with the governor of our new critical access hospital, the only county in Wyoming without one. Every one of these things is just as important. The hard news is just as important as the soft news,” says Cali.

Like today. She’s got an interview with the Pinedale Little League coach Nick Hawkes.

“Hey! Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you!” she greets him when he arrives.

“Good to meet you too,” Nick says.

“You can sit here and then if you want to grab that chair right there. We'll make it quick and painless for you, don't worry, I promise. I appreciate you taking the time to come over to me, my life is really crazy these days,” Cali tells him.

“No worries. Thanks for having me,” he says.

Cali starts her interview, leaning forward across her desk, pen poised to take notes. “ I've only been here two years, but I've seen so much growth, and success within the program just in those two years. So could you talk to me a little bit, Nick, about where you came from in terms of this program launching here in Sublette County and how it looks kind of today?”

“When I took over,  of course we were at the old ball fields, and I think we had right around like 60 kids in  and now this year we had 142 kids signed up.”

Cali interviews the Little League coach Nick Hawkes at her desk. Photo by Melodie Edwards

Cali clearly has done her Little League homework. She knows all about their trip to Oakland, California, and some disappointing losses this season. Sure, she’s getting accosted at protests but she’s also making sure that doesn’t get in the way of the day to day news. 

Steve with Rebuild Local News says independent local news – like what Cali is committed to – it is still possible.

“We should no longer accept the premise that the only choice is shutting down or selling your newspaper to a hedge fund,” he says. “We need to come up with a third alternative there that is about replanting that newspaper into the community. And we are seeing more examples of this. It’s the very beginning of a new trend.”

He says we need to see these papers as community institutions, not businesses. In season two of this podcast called Ghost Town(ing), we talked to author Samuel Western about how a town starts to turn into a ghost town if it doesn’t have three things: a post office, a school and a newspaper. 

Steve agrees. “You're looking at it as a community institution that's just important to have the same way you have a library or schools or a diner, like some of the important things one must have in a town to make it a proper town.”

To make sure rural towns stay viable, Steve’s organization is now hard at work to help pass a bipartisan bill called the Community News and and Small Business Support Act to help local news organizations survive. By bipartisan I’m talking 21 Republicans and 32 Democrats in the house. 

It's really clever. The tax credit literally goes to restaurants and hardware stores and car dealerships if they advertise in local newspapers or radio.  They're the ones who decide which place to place the ads. It's very First Amendment-friendly and it helps both. It helps the small businesses with their marketing costs and it helps the local news,” Steve says.

The bill would also give a payroll tax credit to newspapers to hire more local reporters. More advertising and more reporters? Heck, yeah, Cali could definitely use all that to keep the Pinedale Roundup from ghost papering. 

Journalism Can Never Remain Silent

These days, Cali is still covering the wolf story – state lawmakers recently assembled a predator treatment working group and drafted a bill that would give steeper fines for keeping an injured predator. She’ll make sure her community gets updates as it works its way through the legislature. 

“Are you feeling appreciated?” I ask her.

“You know, no, not really,” she says. “I realized that there are a lot of people who think like, ‘Oh, Cali, we really do appreciate what you're doing.’ I should say, there've been some wonderful community members who've sent me flowers, sent me cards. And then when people found out that I was doing this all on my own, I started hearing from people all around the country who were like, ‘I just want to say thank you,’ and so it's been really nice, in that regard.  Do I think I'm compensated fairly for it? No, not at all. I live paycheck-to-paycheck. I'm lucky if I make it from one paycheck to the next.  I think that sometimes when you're able to do something, and you're able to do it decently well, then you just earn yourself more hard work. I'm torn on the performance that I've had in these last 20 weeks on my own, because as it turns out, I can make a paper by myself. 

But knowing she can do this only lays on the weight of her task more heavily. Cali says, every day she comes to work, she recognizes the stakes couldn’t be higher. She has some advice for all the small town journalists toiling away in offices just like hers.

“There's such great power in journalism to do good, and there's not enough good in this world. I would urge other journalists who might find themselves in my position, or even just having a really bad week where everyone was mad at them for something that they wrote or did, to hold on to those moments where you know that you've made a difference in your community.  I have a favorite quote that is, ‘journalism can never remain silent. That’s its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.’”

That’s a quote from Henry Grunwald, the longtime editor of Time magazine and a refugee who escaped Nazi-occupied Austria. It’s something so important to remember as small town journalists forge a path into the future. The Pinedale Roundup won’t be going silent anytime soon. At least, as long as Cali O’Hare is at the helm.

A Postscript

Before you go, there’s an update to this story. A few weeks before the  release of this episode, Cali had a complaint filed against her with the Wyoming Press Association. I was able to get a copy of the complaint. It claimed Cali misrepresented an interaction at a protest with a local veteran in a Facebook post. In part the complaint read, “The protesters spat on him and when one of them said her relative got fired he said "Good!" in the heated moment and Ms. O'Hare ran with it and made it out that this Veteran and hometown do-gooder was really evil reincarnate!” I reached out to the complainant for comment but received no response. 

I hopped on zoom with Cali to hear her side of the story. She says in early April she was attending the Hands Off! protest that drew millions of people across the country, even in small-town Pinedale. She was there as a citizen, as someone who has been affected by the federal cuts – her partner lost two firefighting jobs due to federal funding freezes. Standing on the street, someone pulled over and asked what they were protesting.

“He came up to me, kind of leaning over his trailer hitch, and he was shaking visibly, shaking his hands, his face shaking. I think we've all kind of seen a person like that before, just so angry that it's visible in their body language,” Cali says.

When she told him her partner lost his job with the federal government, the man named Phil Vrska, said, “Good.” So she says she left. 

Later, she posted a photo of the veteran talking to protesters on social media. The complaint was not about something printed in the Pinedale RoundUp but on the paper’s Facebook page. It wasn’t the veteran who filed the complaint but a local woman on his behalf. But Cali says the veteran later came to her office and they ended up talking for four hours.

“ I think he truly regretted that he had said that,” Cali says. “I think that he realized that that was an awful thing to say. He actually contacted the Wyoming Press Association and let them know, ‘Cali never spat at me. None of this is true.’ Actually, he told me that the things that that woman wrote in her letter, he'd never told her. So I'm not sure where the disconnect happened between those two individuals.”

When I reached out to the Wyoming Press Association, they told me its job isn’t to police the state’s news organizations. Cali received no consequences for the complaint, and her publisher hasn’t contacted her about it either. 

But since then a barber shop put up a large colorful sign on Main Street that reads, “Thank you Captain Phil Vrska. Four tours US Marines. Pinedale Roundup, it’s time to get accurate and factual in your journalism.” The local pushback didn’t stop there, though. She says recently someone also shot a BB gun at her car, leaving holes in both her front and back windows.

“But you are going on vacation?” I ask.

“I am. I'm really excited. I'm going on vacation. It makes me laugh that they have five people doing my job while I'm gone,” Cali says. “But I'm so grateful for my colleagues at my sister papers who are stepping up and doing this so that I can take a little vacation.”

It’s not much, but it’ll have to do. Cali is heading off for a one-week vacation to go to her nephew’s graduation.

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