Heritage, and a Mission

Two Years of The Byway

Two years ago this month, The Byway printed its very first issue of the newspaper. It seems fitting at this time to look back and analyze why we decided to print a newspaper in the first place. 

What did we hope to accomplish by working long hours for no pay to print what was going on in Wayne, Garfield and Piute counties? By most standards we would be considered fools to jump into this endeavor with no training and no real money to start a paper.

After considering a number of names for the paper, the editors decided to call the paper The Byway. It was under this name that we planned to work on our three goals, which describe who we are and what we do. This is our mission:

1. To open a forum for positive civil discourse.
2. To unify Piute, Wayne and Garfield Counties, with content about us, written by us.
3. To provide our youth the opportunity to write, and be read.

Civil Discourse

In The Byway, we frequently discuss topics of great concern and of great importance to us. We write our opinions. Not everyone agrees on all topics, so we are careful to rely on civil discourse as our guiding principle in how we discuss those topics.

We also cover some of the news and events we see happening in these three counties. To me, it’s more than just reporting news so we can keep up current. I see any newspaper is a historical document and will be looked at in the future to tell the history of our region.

Keeping a newspaper as a history is a challenging goal as events come and go before we know what has happened. We also have a large area to cover. You can imagine what a challenge it is to be everywhere enough to cover all three counties!

Unity along the Byway

We also wanted to create a sense of unity between the counties of Wayne, Garfield and Piute. These areas are very similar in many ways and have historically faced some of the same challenges. 

For example, one of the challenges we all share as small counties is sustaining jobs that will support families that would like to live here. Although we have diverse terrain and many people find the area beautiful, most people only stay for a brief visit. Many of our children who would like to live here cannot find jobs that will pay them enough to keep their family comfortable. Often we have quipped that our best export is our children!

We share a common heritage that ties us to the land on which we live for our livelihoods. Traditional ranching, timber and mining endeavors have shaped a people who not only love the land we live on, but have also grown a strong people willing to sacrifice to stay in this area. 

Our ancestors planted deep roots and taught their children so that they could sustain the land, which we have done for the last 150 years. It is easy to become resentful of outside forces telling us we have been doing it wrong. We acknowledge that other people may have destroyed their lands, but we have not destroyed ours.

Supporting Our Youth

In looking at life to see what things really matter to us, we see that much of life revolves around our youth. They are constantly busy and involved in sports, participating in church activities, working in the tourism industry, and just being kids. 

Each week our kids have new activities such as livestock shows, plays, mountain bike teams and running. Parents follow their children and support them. Much of the social life in our area revolves around our youth, and we grow close as communities by supporting them.

Although our youth across communities compete with one another in sports, I see many of them walk away as the best of friends with students from other teams. Some even marry people from one of the other counties. 

We felt strongly that we wanted to showcase our youth and report their activities. It is impossible to be to everything that is happening. We make it whenever we can and take lots of pictures.

With so much revolving around the youth, we realized it was critical to our mission that we give our youth the opportunity to write for the paper. This goal has taken a great deal of time both in assigning and encouraging them to complete articles, but also in editing and teaching them to write creatively.

Accomplishing The Byway‘s Missions

We look back on the last two years with great pride, especially when we see what our youth have done. Since we first started, we have published over 1,100 articles. About 95% of these were written by people inside our three counties, and over 40% of our articles were written by our youth!

That is a lot of work for busy teenagers. They are amazing, and it has been a joy to watch them learn and grow. We are still looking for writers among our youth and would encourage any of the youth who think they would like to try to write a short piece to contact us! Being a published writer can make a big difference in the future of a student.

You may have noticed that this spring, we changed to publishing more frequently online rather than as a weekly paper. Of course, we continue to publish a newspaper monthly. 

Nowadays, you can go on Facebook and to our website and read articles at any time. Going forward, many of those articles will be published in print form also. It is impossible to publish all of the articles in print, but we put in as many as possible.

Moving Forward

The Byway will continue to work with our youth and encourage them to write, draw and take pictures for us. We would encourage each of you to mention to them when you read their article or see their pictures in the paper.

As the late Lucile Proctor and I chose for our theme when we worked with the youth in 4-H many years ago, “Our future is in our youth.” We lived by that motto. Now, The Byway lives by that motto.

Overarching our mission is our desire to preserve our heritage and values as we pass it on to these young people who have the strength to carry on.

We are proud of our heritage and love its values, and as an organization, we want to boldly carry the banner to promote those values. We are still a young paper. As we grow up, we hope to win your trust as a voice that can honor our heritage and properly voice the values of the people living along the Byway.

– by Elaine Baldwin

Feature image caption: Cows graze along Utah Highway 143 in Garfield County.

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