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Pinedale’s main drag makes it hard to forget the town’s storied past as a site for early 19th century rendezvous for fur-trappers, tribes and ranchers.
Along Pine Street, there’s the Cowboy Bar, Mountain Man statue, hand-painted wooden street signs and still, no stop lights.
For a town so steeped in its frontier legacy, it only recently became even more of a news desert.
For years, two newspapers covered the Sublette County seat of 2,000 residents: the Sublette Examiner and the Pinedale Roundup.
After Wyoming Newspapers, Inc. acquired both in July 2023, the new publisher’s first move involved merging the two and cutting staff.
Soon after, Cali O’Hare received just two days’ notice that her reporters would be laid off or forced to take transfers across the state.
Out of three full-time employees on the news desk before the merger, she is the last one standing.
“There were 13 cuts implemented across the company, which has newspapers all over the U.S. and three of those cuts came to newsrooms in Wyoming,” O’Hare said.
Now, nearly every job that would be on a traditional masthead is O’Hare’s responsibility. Though her official title is managing editor, she’s also a reporter, copy editor, page designer, photographer, magazine editor and office manager.
Running a one-woman newspaper, O’Hare can’t cover everything. County commissioner and town council meetings often overlap and can be up to eight hours long.
She’s the first to admit that it was easier to keep up with the 20-page weekly when she had multiple reporters and an editor.
She’s noticed Pinedale residents turning to less traditional places for news, like Facebook pages.
“People share information in those, but of course that’s not anything coming from trained journalists. It’s just information, flyers, events, sometimes rumors,” she said.
As the newspapers scaled back, Pinedale real estate agent Blake Coble saw an opportunity for a new community outlet. Last fall, he put a radio station on the airwaves.
It’s a rare move in the era of outlets consolidating or closing shop nationwide. Coble’s attorney for his Federal Communications Commission licence said as much.
“He’s like, ‘you are just one of the few individuals that are actually starting up a station in the last 10 years,’” Coble said.
His new station, 102.7 FM, is known as “The Peak.” It doesn’t have a formal news desk, though Coble said that is a goal. For now, The Peak still brings variety to the local stations, which have been dominated by country music.
Instead, The Peak is better known for its casual daily call-in shows with regular rounds of trivia and community announcements from a rotating cast of local hosts.
While many outlets are closing shop, Blake Coble’s 102.7FM “The Peak” is just getting started. The Pinedale resident was inspired by a gig as a local sportscaster and his hometown stations back in “Music City,” or Nashville, Tenn.
The Peak offers a new hub for connection. Coble and his real estate colleagues also use it to promote their listings.
The early days of The Peak offer a look into struggles news outlets face across the country as revenue, content and political fury collide.
Early on, Coble did have a news talk show with a local host. Big Piney resident Tom Roberts, who has more than five decades of radio experience across seven stations, brought nostalgia and commentary to his news reports.
Name any year and Roberts will give a newscast in the broadcast style of the time — and he’ll do it on the spot.
In between syndicated programming from USA Radio Network and the Cowboy State Daily, Roberts delivered a newscast reminiscent of past decades.
“In the 1950s, news was very matter of fact. It was very businesslike,” Roberts said. “In the ‘70s, it was like…‘he popped his beak off when they hit a military vehicle going down the back street in Detroit — News live at :55!’”
In line with his uncanny ability to whip out impressions, Roberts has a collection of over a hundred radios, thousands of books and records to show for it. Many of the books come from his work as a theology lecturer across the Mountain West and ordained priest with the Ecumenical Worldwide Catholic Church.
Next to a 1930s-era Zenith the size of a small refrigerator, Roberts has smaller radios from Germany and Russia. In the backyard, he has satellites set up so he can tune into stations all around the world, if the atmospheric conditions are just right.
Roberts’ expertise helped Coble get The Peak on air. He taught Coble everything from how to organize a broadcast hour to tips on engineering, advertising and writing jingles.
But he lasted only two and a half months hosting the drive time news talk show. Not long after adding his own commentary on the early days of President Donald Trump’s second administration, advertisers started pushing back.
“I received feedback of why do you have this liberal guy on the radio? And I’m like, well he does a good job and he presents it so well,” Coble said.
Roberts was well aware that he was going against the grain. Critiquing Trump and then, his right hand man, Elon Musk, amid sweeping federal cuts under Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wasn’t likely going to sit well in a county that voted 79% for Trump in 2024.
Wyoming also was the reddest state in the most recent presidential election.
Critique was Roberts’ default. Before playing country classics by Faith Hill or Garth Brooks, Roberts would question Republican tax cuts for the rich, the impact on veterans and medicaid or the feud about the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.
Of the latter, Roberts shared a pointed rebuttal on his show after the Trump administration went after news outlets that refused to change style guides to include “Gulf of America.”
“What’s wrong with this picture is the media that goes against the current administration, or even says something different, become targets just like they do in fascist countries.”
Tom Roberts is an ordained priest and radio enthusiast. Of the hundred or so radios at his Big Piney home, he anticipates about 60 of them work. Big Piney is a Sublette County town of just under 400 residents, about a 45-minute drive south of Pinedale, but Roberts makes the 95-minute drive to Jackson whenever there’s an anti-Trump protest. (Jenna McMurtry / KHOL)
“I’m not saying America is a totally fascist country, but why flirt with those techniques? Because we are dealing with a power grab in Washington,” Roberts continued.
Roberts defended his blunt, loudly delivered opinions. He’s not trying to “reverse propagandize” Pinedale residents, he said. He just wanted them to consider another argument, or another version of the truth, on national issues.
“I was just saying… listen to the other side of it because I knew they would never listen to NPR,” Roberts said.
Roberts has watched the news polarize over his decades in radio.
When he was getting started, regulators required equal air time to opposing perspectives. The Federal Communications Commission ended the Fairness Doctrine, as the policy was known, in 1987.
“Broadcasting used to be the fifth estate. We used to be seen as, boy, trustworthy,” Roberts said.
Roberts believes his political criticism, however lost on an audience, is a matter of ethics. Failing to do so, he said, is selling out.
Coble requested Roberts play a bit more modern music than his usual ‘40s and ‘50s tunes and dial back the commentary. Eventually, he took Roberts off the most popular slot and replaced it with programming by a Central Wyoming College professor based a few hours away, in Riverton. After trying to work past their differences, Coble and Roberts cut business ties.
O’Hare, at the newspaper, is glad to have The Peak. The more community forums, the better, she said. But, she doesn’t find the tension on the news side surprising.
This time, advertiser pushback was from the right, but O’Hare has also seen the inverse. When she was a radio reporter in Carbon County, she said her boss took a pro-Trump stance and suffered similar losses. Either way, she said the pressure for advertising in a struggling news market isn’t healthy for an informed electorate.
“Ultimately, it’s the citizens of Sublette County who are suffering and who are not receiving timely information and the robust news coverage that they’re used to or that they deserve,’ O’Hare said.
Just recently, she learned that her publisher is talking to one of the country’s largest newspaper owners.
“Carpenter Media Group usually spells bad news for newspapers, so I actually anticipate having probably even less resources,” O’Hare said.
