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The Nevada Press Association Board of Directors approved three membership applications at its meeting last week, designating two newspapers and a local news website as affiliate members with full voting rights in the association.
The two newspapers are fairly recent start-ups publishing in rural areas of the state. The local news website covers the Carson City area.
The Mesquite Monthly is a 28-page printed tabloid that has been distributed free-of-charge at about 50 locations throughout the Mesquite area for almost two years. It is owned and operated by Kirk Kern, former chief operating officer of Battle Born Media and former board member and president of NPA. Kern also provides local news to the area on a daily basis via MesquiteLocalNews.com, the web presence of the BBM newspaper he was managing when it was shuttered in March 2020.
Battle Born Media also formerly employed Teresa Stewart (pictured on right), owner of the second newspaper that became an NPA member last week. Stewart started the White Pine County-based Bristlecone Tribune after she was laid off at the beginning of the pandemic from her sales position with BBM’s The Ely Times. She published the first issue of the Tribune a little over a year ago. In twelve months it has attracted over 300 subscribers, who pay $50 for home delivery or $70 to receive each issue via the mail. The newsstand price is 75 cents.
Carson Now, the local news website that became an NPA member last week, has been publishing at CarsonNow.org for over 12 years and has become a significant presence on the news scene in the state’s capitol. It is owned by Kirk Caraway (pictured at top of page), who grew up in Kansas in a newspaper-owning family and worked for newspapers in Idaho and Wyoming before landing in the Carson City/Lake Tahoe area in the mid-90’s to work for Swift Communications. In 1995, he launched Tahoe.com, Swift’s first website and Nevada’s first news website. In addition to Carson Now, Caraway also operates a local news website in the South Lake Tahoe area.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Caraway created the “social media-based content advertising system” now used on his Carson City and South Lake Tahoe news websites while serving as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.