Cimarron Valley Communications, LLC is owned by MaryLee and J. D. Meisner, a husband-and-wife team who publish three newspapers: the Cushing Citizen, Keystone Gusher and Yale News.
They also own Smartypants, a syndicated kids’ activity page for newspapers, and Trash Panda Digital, a digital marketing agency.
So there they are: a schoolteacher and a longtime newspaper editor who took the plunge and found themselves swimming in the deep end of small business ownership.
Yep — that’s them.
And this is how they got here.
The story started in January of 2019, when J. D. changed jobs. David Reid, then publisher of the Cushing Citizen, recruited him to become the newspaper’s managing editor.
By June, J. D. and David were having one of those conversations that starts out ordinary and ends up changing everything. David told him that he and his wife, Myra, were ready to slow their lives down.
Then he looked at J. D. and said, “Meisner, you ought to just buy this sucker.”
Just like that, a longtime dream came bubbling to the surface.
MaryLee and J. D. spent long days talking it over, crunching numbers and building a business plan. It took six months, a lot of faith and a fair amount of scraping, but they found a way to make the purchase.
On paper, the plan looked rock solid.
Oil — the fuel that fed Cushing’s economy — was stable at $52 a barrel. The schools were in great shape. Circulation was on the rise. Advertising sales were strong. The community was behind them.
What could possibly go wrong?
Their plan was bulletproof.
Then March 2020 showed up.
Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
On March 11, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic came to town and punched the Cushing Citizen, and its brand-new owners, right in the mouth.
And yes, it hurt.
Like everyone else, MaryLee and J. D. had to adjust quickly. They made new plans. They innovated. They reassessed. They made changes they had never expected to make and learned lessons they would have preferred not to learn the hard way.
The pandemic had a profound impact on the Citizen and on the community of Cushing. But the paper survived.
And somehow, against all odds, during the height of mandates, lockdowns and uncertainty, the Meisners started a little side quest.
Enter Smartypants.
MaryLee is an active schoolteacher and reading specialist with decades of classroom experience. Her kids are everything to her.
When families began isolating at home in the spring of 2020, school-aged children suddenly lost the normal five to six hours of daily instruction they received in the classroom. MaryLee grew deeply concerned that elementary-aged students — her kids — could lose nearly a full year of learning by the time school started again in the fall.
She worried they would forget how to learn.
So she decided her new newspaper needed to do something useful.
The Cushing Citizen needed a kids’ activity page.
MaryLee and J. D. started shopping for one. The options were limited. The prices were not. They needed something well-constructed, affordable and ready to go every week. More than anything, they wanted something a kid would actually look at and think, “This looks fun!”
They couldn’t find a single product that offered all the things, so they built one themselves.
They called it Smartypants.
Readers loved it. Young readers loved it. Older readers loved it. Parents loved it. Teachers loved it. Advertisers loved it, too, They created ad space at the bottom of the page and watched it start generating revenue.
Before long, they realized Smartypants could help other community publishers, too.
They invested a little money, marketed it to newspapers across the country and offered it at a very affordable monthly rate. What started as a home-cooked kids’ page from Cushing, Oklahoma, is now published in dozens of newspapers across the country every week.
Then came expansion.
In late July of 2020, a newspaper publisher in a neighboring town contacted J. D. with an unexpected offer. After decades in the business, she was done. The pandemic had taken the wind out of her sails, and her community newspapers were for sale.
The papers were struggling. They were four-page, black-and-white products.
But they had potential.
So MaryLee and J. D. took another leap of faith and became the new owners of the Drumright Gusher and Yale News.
Their daughter, Allie Prater, stepped in to handle editing duties and quickly became an ambassador for the new properties.
Allie schmoozed and charmed her way into the hearts of the Yale community, then suggested expanding the paper’s coverage area to include neighboring Glencoe, a town that had gone without newspaper coverage for decades.
Glencoe adopted Allie as one of its own.
On the heels of that success, Allie suggested expanding the Drumright Gusher’s coverage area to include the Town of Mannford, which had been without a newspaper for more than seven years.
She hit another home run.
The expansion worked so well that the Drumright Gusher was rebranded as the Keystone Gusher, covering the Keystone Lake area. Since then, Sand Springs has also been added to the paper’s coverage area.
The Meisners kept building.
In 2022, they published “Keystone,” an annual glossy visitors’ guide to Keystone Lake. This has become the company’s flagship product, the one they are most proud of.
They also publish About Us Magazine, a business progress publication that had long been a product of the Cushing Citizen, and was since expanded to include all three newspaper coverage areas. Thousands of copies are printed and distributed.
Then there is the reader favorite, the advertiser favorite and the Meisner family favorite: “Cimarron Christmas,” a booklet-sized, 100-plus-page glossy packed with Christmas cheer, recipes and Christmas carols.
By the spring of 2023, MaryLee and J. D. saw another need.
They believed then, and still believe, that newspaper advertising remains the most cost-effective way to reach a local audience. But they also knew many of their advertising customers were looking beyond the Cimarron Valley. Those businesses needed modern tools to reach people through digital platforms.
The Meisners knew their customers were going to go somewhere for those services.
So they figured they might as well learn how to do it themselves.
That was the beginning of Trash Panda Digital Marketing.
Trash Panda Digital gives their advertisers access to modern digital tools while keeping them connected to a trusted local media company. Its services can deliver messages to mobile phones en masse anywhere in the country or the world. It can place advertisers’ messages in homes through streaming television services. It can geofence events and locations and help businesses reach the people who were there.
The goal is not to replace newspaper advertising. The goal is to build another revenue stream that helps support the journalism at the center of everything Cimarron Valley Communications does.
Because that is still the heart of it.
The communities in their coverage area — Agra, Cleveland, Cushing, Drumright, Glencoe, Hallett, Jennings, Mannford, Ripley, Olive, Oilton, Prue and Sand Springs — see value in the news and sports that Cimarron Valley Communications delivers each week.
They know these papers are about them.
Their communities. Their neighbors. Their schools. Their churches. Their teams. Their businesses. Their families.
Community news is alive and well in the Cimarron Valley of Oklahoma, and it is alive and well in towns across this nation.
Without local newspapers, there is no other mechanism in existence that will accurately record and preserve the history, heritage, trials, tribulations and triumphs of these communities.
For MaryLee and J. D. Meisner, that responsibility is not just a business.
It is an immeasurable honor.
They are grateful to be entrusted with it.
And they thank their readers, advertisers and communities for their support.