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 school teacher and a longtime newspaper editor who took the plunge and are now floating in the pool of small business ownership.
Yep - that’s us! — you’re probably wondering how we got here.
Here’s our story…
J. D. Changed jobs in January of 2019 when the Cushing Citizen’s then Publisher David Reid recruited him to become the Citizen’s managing editor.
Fast forward to June, J. D. And David were having a discussion about the Citizen. Reid said he and his wife Myra were ready to slow their lives down. David ended that conversation by saying, “Meisner, you ought to just buy this sucker.”
A longtime dream bubbled to the surface — MaryLee and J. D. Spent long days talking it over, crunching numbers and building a business plan. It took six months but they scraped up the means to make the purchase.
Their plan was rock solid. What could possibly go wrong? 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 and the community was behind us.
Our plan was bulletproof.
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In 1987, Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Like most everyone else, on March 11, 2020, the COVID 19 pandemic came to town and punched the Cushing Citizen, and its new owners, right in the mouth — and it hurt.
We made new plans, we innovated, we reassessed and made adjustments.
The pandemic had a profound impact on the Citizen and the community of Cushing, but we survived it and against all odds, during the height of mandates and lockdowns, we started a little side quest.
Enter Smartypants
MaryLee is an active school teacher and reading specialist with decades of classroom experience. Her kids are everything.
When families began isolating at home in spring of 2020, school-aged kids stopped receiving the normal five to six daily hours of instruction that classroom learning was providing.
She grew concerned that elementary-aged kids —her kids — would essentially lose a full year of instruction by the time school started back up in the fall. She feared they would forget how to learn
She decided that her new newspaper, the Cushing Citizen, needed to do something to help. We needed to publish a kids activity page’
We shopped — options were limited — and cost-prohibitive. We needed a well constructed, ready-to-go weekly kids’ page that wouldn’t break the bank — something that kids would look at and think, “this looks fun!
We set out to create our own and called it Smartypants
Our readers loved it — young and old — they loved it. We created ad space at the bottom of the page to sell and it started generating revenue. Advertisers gobbled it up.
We wanted to share this opportunity with our fellow community publishers in the industry. We invested a little money and marketed Smartypants to the nation’s newspapers, offering it at a very affordable monthly rate. Our little home-cooked kids’ page is now published in dozens of newspapers across the country every week.
Expansion
In late July of 2020, a newspaper publisher in a neighboring town contacted me 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 papers were for sale. The papers were struggling. They were four-page black and white products but they had potential.
We took another leap of faith and became the new owners of the Drumright Gusher and Yale News.
Allie Prater, our daughter, stepped in to take on editing duties and became an amazing ambassador for these new properties.
She schmoozed and charmed her way into the hearts of the Yale community and suggested increasing that paper’s coverage area to neighboring Glencoe who hadn’t had newspaper coverage in decades. Glencoe adopted Allie as one of their own.
On the heels of that expansion, Allie suggested we expand the Drumright Gusher’s coverage area to include the Town of Mannford, who hadn’t had a newspaper for more than seven years. Allie hit another home run. So much so that the Gusher has been rebranded as the Keystone Gusher, covering the Keystone Lake Area, and we have since included Sand Springs in our coverage area.
In 2022, we published “Keystone” an annual, glossy visitors’ guide to Keystone Lake.
About Us Magazine, a business progress publication that had been a long-time product of the Citizen, was expanded to all three newspaper coverage areas and in January of each year we print thousands of copies.
Our favorite publication, and the hands-down favorite of our readers and advertisers is “Cimarron Christmas” a booklet-sized, 100-plus-page glossy that is stuffed with Christmas cheer in the form of recipes and Christmas carols.
In the spring of 2023, we realized another need and created TrashPanda Digital Marketing. While we know that newspaper advertising is the most cost effective means to get your marketing message to a local audience, we also understand that many of our advertising customers are looking beyond the Cimarron Valley for commerce, and are looking for modern ways to market their businesses. TrashPanda Digital bridges this gap. We knew they were going to go somewhere for their digital needs, so let’s figure out how to do it.
Our innovative digital marketing services can deliver our advertisers’ messages to mobile phones en masse, anywhere in the country, or the world. TrashPanda can get our clients’ messages delivered to their targets’ homes via streaming television services. We can geofence events and locations and get our advertisers in front of the folks who were there.
This added product and additional revenue will help us stay true to our journalism roots.
Small communities in our coverage area, Agra, Cushing, Drumright, Glencoe, Hallet, Jennings, Mannford, Ripley, Olive, Oilton, Prue and Sand Springs see infinite value in the news and sports we deliver each week. They know our papers are about them, about their communities, about their neighbors and about their families.
Community news is alive and well in the Cimarron Valley of Oklahoma and all across this nation.
Without local newspapers, there is no other mechanism in existence that is going to accurately record and preserve the history, the heritage, the trials, tribulations and triumphs of your communities.
It is an immeasurable honor to be entrusted with this profound privilege.
Thank you for your support.