A painful paper cut and the Johnson St. jam

Lee Enterprises, the national newspaper chain that operates most of Montana’s major legacy news outlets, has laid off Rob Chaney, a longtime fixture at the Missoulian who was most recently the paper’s managing editor.

Chaney appears to be the only Montana layoff in this round of cuts. But he’s far from the only one in recent years, a period in which the financially struggling Lee Enterprises has laid off or otherwise lost more than a dozen journalists and editors across the state and decades in corresponding experience. Lee, based in Iowa, has had a grip on Montana dailies since it purchased the Missoulian, the Billings Gazette and several other papers from the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1959.

“I just got laid off from the Missoulian newspaper after 28 years with Lee Enterprises, the last four as managing editor and statewide enterprise editor,” Chaney said on Facebook last week. “It has been a fantastic run. And I have many miles more to go. Hang tough.”

Chaney told The Pulp that he was notified of his layoff, effective immediately, in a call with Missoulian executive editor Steve Kiggins and a representative from the Lee human relations department at 8:01 on Friday morning. Kiggins, who had previously worked as the top editor of the Lee-owned Times News of Twin Falls, Idaho, and as a national editor with USA TODAY, was tapped to lead the Missoulian and Lee’s other Montana papers late last year. Kiggins did not return a request for comment.

“I was very surprised,” Chaney said. “As far as I know I don’t have any performance or personnel issues.”

Chaney grew up in Missoula and first joined the Missoulian as an intern in 1987. In between freelancing and stints at other papers in Montana, Chaney worked just about every beat at the Missoulian, some that now seem figments of the media industry’s distant, better-funded past — the nighttime cops and courts job, for example.

He became the managing editor of the Missoulian in 2022, capping a period of instability marked by the departure of executive editor Jim Van Nostrand, managing editor Keila Szpaller and other masthead restructuring. Last year, Chaney became Lee’s statewide enterprise editor, a position that allowed him to oversee and produce long-form, hard-hitting feature journalism at all of Lee’s Montana papers.

“To be perfectly honest, I was not at my best as a managing editor,” he said in an interview with The Pulp Tuesday. “It was a lot of making trains run on time. But I really enjoyed — I have to watch my verb tenses — being the statewide enterprise editor mainly because I got to help other people do a bunch of incredible projects.”

He said he’s especially proud of the fact that he helped raise about $60,000 in outside grant money so these enterprising reporters could do their work.

“That’s resources that most papers and news stations just don’t have.”

Chaney, a 2020 Nieman Foundation fellow in science journalism, is also an author. In 2022, the University of Washington Press published his “The Grizzly in the Driveway,” a chronicle of the burgeoning grizzly bear population and the charismatic predator’s relationship with urban and natural environments.

“Information has never gone out of style or value. All we’re arguing about is the delivery system.”

Montana’s social media commentariat has laid into Lee for laying off someone with decades of institutional knowledge and a substantial rolodex. But Chaney said his brain isn’t going anywhere.

“The experience isn’t lost unless you’re dead,” he said. “A whole lot of people still have my phone number and I’ll pick it up any time. I’m honored to be of help to anyone who will ask for it.”

The more relevant question is how the legacy news industry can convey information to an audience as hungry for it as ever in a state that has about as much national resonance now — whether because of U.S. Sen. Jon Tester’s race against Tim Sheehy or the “Yellowstone” TV series or pandemic transplants — as it has since the days of the Copper Collar.

“Information has never gone out of style or value,” Chaney said. “All we’re arguing about is the delivery system. For the wider public, figuring out where to go for stuff is getting a lot harder. Can you afford it, can you find it, can you put it in a format that doesn’t give you epilepsy? I’ve likened it to running a white water river blind.”

Whether that delivery system is best funded through advertising, subscriptions, philanthropy, sponsorship or something else, Chaney can’t say.

“If I could answer that question, you’d be working for me and so would everybody else,” he said.

In the meantime, Chaney said he still has several ongoing projects in various stages of prepublication, some of which will have to find a new home. At the end of the day, he said, he’s a storyteller.

“If I need to, I’ll just set up a card table at Higgins and Broadway and shake people down and have them tell me a story,” he said.

City inks Johnson Street Shelter agreement

The Missoula City Council on Monday evening voted to approve an interlocal funding agreement that will keep the Johnson Street Temporary Emergency Shelter operating through August 31, 2026.

Johnson Street, which first opened in 2020 as a winter shelter, provided services year round in 2023 thanks to American Rescue Plan Act funding. The shelter is operated through an agreement with the Poverello Center, Missoula’s primary year-round homeless shelter.

That ARPA funding sunsets this year. In May, recently elected Mayor Andrea Davis said she would be requesting another round of funding to keep the shelter open during the ensuing fiscal year. The shelter can sleep up to 165 a night.

The agreement approved by the council this week splits the roughly $1.8 million annual cost of operating the shelter between the city and Missoula County. Although the contract technically lasts two years, the city will have to approve another batch of funding for the shelter in 2025. At the end of those two years, at least in theory, the Missoula Redevelopment Agency will redevelop the property, which the city initially purchased in 2017 for the construction of a mixed-use project. What happens to the shelter’s residents at that juncture is an open question.

The council passed the contract Monday on a 10-2 vote, with councilmembers Bob Campbell and Sandra Vasecka opposed. The two questioned the size and transparency of the contract, the city’s ability to enforce provisions requiring that six shelter residents find “housing solutions” every month, and the city’s purported lack of response to neighbors concerned about safety in nearby areas.

Fair enough, responded Councilmember Mike Nugent on Monday. But that doesn’t mean the city can let the contract expire and tell the shelter’s residents to make tracks, he said.

“While I agree with the issues you outlined being concerning — and I think we need to step up enforcement — unless we have another place to direct people to go, we aren’t simply going to close Johnson Street next month and have 170 people … just leave the community.”