BY: Lizzie Guajardo
Local news in Lindale is not going away any time soon.
An Irving based non-profit media company operated by John Starkey is now operating the weekly newspaper there.
The Lindale News and Times announced last month it would be closing after 124 years of serving the community.
That’s when Starkey swooped in.
His company, Rambler Texas Media, boosts a non-profit structure will tie the newspaper more closely to the community because it will be owned through community sponsorships.
Two weeks after the closure announcement, the rebranded Lindale News rolled off the press and onto racks and mailboxes once again.
“Ultimately, it creates an overall business model that helps everybody,” Starkey said. “That’s what we are trying to do when we donated our paper, we took on a mission of trying to make it everything. An improvement for the whole community, the whole newspaper industry.”
This is not Starkey’s first non-profit newspaper project. He is working with two other newspapers that moved to the non-profit model to keep their doors open.
Starkey owned and operated The Rambler in Irving for 20 years before making the change to a non-profit model in January 2023. He then used this same tactic six months later to save the Ozona Stockman.
Rambler Texas Media serves as the non-profit management company of the three imprints.
Starkey is always looking for ways to better this program and apply a non-profit model similar to those used in other industries, such as radio.
“For the local small community, the newspapers are desperately needed to be saved,” Starkey said. “It starts with rescuing the newspapers that are in the most jeopardy. For us, that’s the ones that are closed or are closing.”
Starkey says he is aware of three other local newspapers that could be closed by the beginning of next year. His goal is to create a non-profit business model that can be used by community newspapers to keep them open, so they can continue to consistently publish positive news about their community that is available not only locally but worldwide.
“If we can pull this off in Lindale, it would mean that we have started to form a system that can walk into a small community newspaper and do a revamping of it in a matter of week,” Starkey said. “This would be the second one we have done.”
As Starkey continues to work with newspapers, he wants to test practices to see what works best and then share them in the industry. His hope is that the next generation of journalists will come in and continue to change the newspaper industry for the better.