Among Monessen, Pennsylvania’s oldest residents, you’ll find some who still hold out hope for a steel-industry comeback; the town is long past its glory days of roaring factories building a young nation. So far, no luck.
Print journalism’s demise seems largely exaggerated, judging from the western Pennsylvania town, roughly an hour’s drive south of Pittsburgh. Just months after the long-time local paper shuttered in 2015, a new iteration, under new ownership, arose, and this year The Mon Valley Independent celebrated a decade in circulation.
To be clear, the process was far from simple. Formerly known as The Valley Independent, the news brand dates back to the turn of the 20th century and ran for more than 113 years before the last ownership group, Trib Total Media, relinquished its smaller daily papers across the greater Pittsburgh metro, in order to focus on its flagship brand and hyperlocal digital titles around the region.
Stacy Wolford joined The Valley Independent in 1996, fresh out of Pittsburgh’s Point Park University. Pride swelled in her voice as she recounted cutting her teeth as an “old-school” journalist.
“When I started in ‘96, we still had our own press. We were fully functional, we had commercial jobs,” said Wolford. “I still remember getting the first few papers right off the press, and back then, we still actually had the old-style copy and pasteup, where they cut the copy to fit. We used an old computer system called Microtech, which is dinosaur-level ages now. I got to really learn the old-school way of journalism. … I really learned how to be a reporter — on-the-ground, knocking on doors, and calling people with an old rotary phone. As things progressed over the years, gosh, things have changed so much in that short amount of time.”
In 2015, the Valley Independent’s closure caught her off guard. By then, Wolford felt settled in Monessen; she lived a short drive away from the newsroom, and her kids went to school nearby. An uncertain future confronted a staff of more than 30 — and the former steel town still reliant on its local newspaper as a lifeline.
Wolford was one of the paper’s younger employees, but her more senior colleagues were facing forced retirement. “We really held hope to the very bitter end, December 31st, that we were going to get a buyer [at] the last second,” she recalled. “And when it didn’t happen, we all went home just really defeated.”
From the ashes
Wolford credits her colleague Jeff Oliver with keeping the Valley Independent’s spirit alive following the closure. She recounted how the then-sportswriter put the “labor” in “labor of love” by hustling to connect with potential investors and meeting with the previous owners in a quest for a solution. He was met with closed door after closed door, according to an op-ed he wrote this past May. Oliver landed an audience with Trib Total Media President and CEO Jennifer Bertetto, who agreed to help.
Within four months of the closure, the new Mon Valley Independent launched. Four members of the local legal and business communities — Keith Bassi, Joseph Dalfonso, Moe Galis and Nazareth Victoria — founded the Mid Mon Valley Publishing Co., named after the broader region and encompassing Monessen and neighboring counties.
“The Valley is comprised of a lot of little communities in a couple of cities — it sits on the edge of the four major counties that surround us,” said Victoria. “You have Allegheny County in the north, Westmoreland County in the east, Washington County in the west, and Fayette County in the south. And the Mon Valley literally sits on the very edges of each one of those counties. … I like to say that the Mon Valley was where America was built, and we’ve been neglected since the ‘80s when steel mills left. Everything left.”
Victoria considers Bertetto one of the paper’s greatest advocates through the process. They provided the fledgling publishing company with archives and subscriber lists to start.
The Mon Valley Independent’s inaugural edition published on May 2, 2016. Wolford wrote the cover story, which triumphantly proclaimed, the “Valley gets its voice back” in a big, bold front-page font. She joked that starting a newspaper in the 2010s is like launching a new horse-drawn carriage.
Despite the quick revival, the previous paper’s circulation did not carry over entirely. Many past subscribers fell through the cracks during the four-month interruption. They focused on rebuilding circulation and the newsroom. Currently, the newsroom employs 10 full-timers, as well as some part-timers.
The new leadership wanted to shift away from any perception of “if it bleeds, it leads.”
“We just didn’t want the emphasis to be on bad news,” said Victoria. “And we got pushback about that, because it seems like old-timers in the newspaper business — which pretty much everybody was — really think that bad news is the way to sell newspapers. Our ownership group didn’t care about that as much as promoting the Mon Valley to be a great place to live.”
“Our group of owners don’t have newspaper backgrounds, so there was a lot of tug and pull with that,” said Wolford. “They’re businessmen, whereas we’re journalists. We had to change our ways of thinking somewhat and think out of the box, without compromising our integrity, the way we write, or our standards.”
COVID-19 struck a few years later. The 2020 pandemic fundamentally changed how things operated, as it did in almost every workplace across the world. Wolford says the newsroom transitioned into a hybrid schedule. Additionally, Monday print editions were eliminated.
And like many local newspapers, the Mon Valley Independent faces frequent turnover even as several original staff members remain. Wolford became managing editor in 2018 and understands the realities of local news being a launch pad for many journalists. She admits a revolving door of entry-level reporters can be frustrating for staffing, but guiding a young journalist under her charge toward a bigger publication is nonetheless rewarding.
“I’ve had a lot of really talented reporters come right out of college, and they tease me that I’m a good farm team,” said Wolford. “They come to me, I train them, and then they get called up to the ‘big time.’ It is a stepping stone. One of our reporters has been with us since we started — she was fresh out of college when she started 10 years ago. And we’ve had some retirements over the time, too. … I’m proud to be a part of their journey when they start with me, and then they move up. I hate to lose them, but I’m so proud of them when they do.”
Peaks and valleys in the Valley
This past May, the Mon Valley Independent celebrated its 10th anniversary. A sold-out gala marked the occasion. Tickets sold out in four days; 230 people turned out for the event. The newspaper sold 21 sponsorships, ranging from $500 to $1,500. Speakers included representatives from Trib Total Media, local business leaders and a member of the community who frequently praises the paper in her letters to the editor.
“She said, the only reason she knows about things that are going on sometimes is because she reads it in our paper,” said Wolford. “That made me feel good.”
In fact, the Mon Valley Independent plays a key role in organizing social life around town. The Valley Grapevine, the paper’s daily calendar, promotes local happenings, down to the local church bake sale. Over the past decade, the Mon Valley Independent newsroom has published an untold number of stories about local people engaging in their community.
“People want to see their kids’ names and photos on our sports page,” said Wolford.
Today, the paper still publishes six days a week — five of those days (Tuesday through Saturday) in print. The Monday edition is strictly online. Trib Total Media’s pressroom still prints the paper.
Every passing day feels earned as the journalism industry continues moving away from print media. Still, the hard copies remain important for the region’s aging population and loyal readers who grew up on the original Valley Independent despite the overhead.
“We’re still hanging on to that,” said Wolford. “We have customers who still want an actual newspaper in hand, but we are trying to push the digital. We’re still having trouble. On Mondays, which is our e-day, some funeral directors don’t want to place an obituary that day, [because they think] nobody’s going to see it. There’s still that mentality that we’re fighting. I always tell everybody, I put as much work into that Monday paper as I do the Tuesday-through-Saturday paper.”
The Mon Valley Independent’s pages also document a community in economic transition. When steel left in the 1980s, so did many residents. While former steel towns attempted to reinvent themselves through small businesses and tourism, too often empty storefronts signaled struggle.
Pittsburgh’s rugged “Steel City” reputation faces reinvention from a recent artificial intelligence and robotics boom. Infrastructure stemming from rail, highways and the Monongahela River long connected the Mon Valley region, and Victoria believes new industries may spread and prosper in the region.
“We really want to be a part of the rebirth of Mon Valley,” said Victoria. “And we think it’s actually starting to take shape. That’s one of the reasons we started the paper.”
Tandy Lau is an award-winning journalist currently based in Jersey City. He currently works as a staff reporter covering public safety for the New York Amsterdam News in Harlem. He can be contacted at tandylau1995@gmail.com
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