Nevada Press Association The best in Nevada journalism since 1924
On Thursday, May 13, the Nevada Press Association Board of Directors held a meeting via Zoom and approved three new publications as affiliate members of the organization. By the end of the day, only two of them were still publishing.
After its membership application was approved, the Mesquite Citizen Journal, a local news website that began its current run on April 1, 2020, announced later the same day that it was ceasing publication. Barbara Ellestad, the website’s editor and founder, says she was forced to close after receiving threats for reporting that the local police chief was being investigated by Nevada’s Attorney General.
Ellestad had previously been a freelance editor and reporter for the weekly newspaper Mesquite Local News. She relaunched the Citizen Journal when the Local News was shuttered at the beginning of the pandemic.
The Fallon Post and Nevada Magazine were also approved for NPA membership during the meeting.
The Fallon Post is a weekly newspaper publishing online since January 2019, and in print since November 2020. (It was also published in print on a monthly basis between August 2019 and March 2020.) It’s a tabloid printed on high-quality bond paper that runs between 28-32 pages each week. The owner/publisher/editor is Rachel Dahl, a journalist whose family has lived in Fallon since she was two years old.
Nevada Magazine is a quarterly publishing since 1936 — with a five-year break during WWII — under the auspices of various state agencies, including the Nevada Department of Tourism and Cultural Affairs since the early 2000s. The glossy magazine has a print circulation of about 12,000 and staff of five, including Executive Editor Megg Mueller, who has been with the publication since 2014 and assumed its leadership when former publisher Janet Geary retired in 2020. It covers urban and rural travel in Nevada, as well as dining, people, history, gaming and events in the state.
The NPA Board also appointed The Nevada Independent’s environmental reporter Daniel Rothberg to its ranks during the meeting. Rothberg, who ran for a seat on the board during NPA’s annual meeting in 2020, will replace Noah Cusick, who stepped down from the board in April.