In January of 2025, Carpenter Media Group acquired Salem Publishing Company in a major acquisition. This deal included Phelps County Focus, the Salem News, and Pulaski County Weekly. In addition to this, the Salem Publishing Company began to experience a major shift in leadership.
A change in ownership means a change in structure. Senior Kendall Langley has been working as the high school Sowers Intern for Phelps County Focus since July 2025, and she sees the motivation and drive in her colleagues.
“A lot of the relationships I have with these other journalists are from these weekly meetings, and you can kind of tell by the type of stories they like to go after and just how they talk about them, that they really care about giving solid stories and comprehensive coverage, and they care about local journalism, and they want to do their best to strengthen it and build the paper however they can,” Langley said.
Phelps County Focus’s sports editor, Dave Roberts, has covered local sports for years. This coverage included Rolla High School sports. Due to personnel shifts, Roberts has left and Phelps County Focus has looked elsewhere for sports coverage.
“I guess stringers [freelancers] is what we’ve been using lately, but the sports coverage is a lot less now that [Roberts is] gone,” Langley said.
Andrew Sheeley has been a staff reporter for Phelps County Focus for nine years. Sheeley confirms the changes to sports-specific coverage, but he points to the local reporting that is still happening through paper journalism.
“I’m writing,” Sheeley said. “We’ve got somebody covering the city council. I would say, it’s just, you know, there’s less people to [report] those things though.”
Staff reduction is not exclusive to Rolla either. Media consolidation is the process by which larger media companies in the business buy smaller ones, often leading to layoffs and watered-down media coverage with less diverse perspectives. While Rolla’s Phelps County Focus might not be experiencing this to the fullest extent, that doesn’t mean other local newspapers aren’t experiencing these issues.
Media consolidation is a widespread problem in the U.S. Lack of coverage for small paper media outlets is an increasing risk and is becoming more and more common. According to the Local News Initiative, “Since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished. Newspapers continue to disappear at a rate of more than two per week; in the past year alone, 130 newspapers have shut their doors.” Due to this, outsourced, independent news is becoming more and more relevant. Langley believes that readers appreciate having a community-focused paper but recognizes the challenges of comprehensive print coverage.
“You do have to adapt to a different type of sports coverage, but there are a lot of independent and state websites and social media pages that cover high school sports,” said Langley.
For many Rolla sports enthusiasts, the solution to the sports coverage gap has been Facebook pages like Mid Mo Sports Online or Inside the Huddle that cover sport events for schools. Consumers follow accounts that post regular updates during games, livestream events, and write post-game stories that cover everything that happened during the games.
Regardless of these changes to print news, dedicated journalists all around the U.S. like Sheeley are working to give locals the most accurate regional coverage possible.
