Economies of scale
Teri Saylor
Special to Publishers' Auxiliary
Sep 1, 2026
Pat Davis strives to preserve local news in New Mexico’s vast landscape and is going about it in the most nontraditional way
After buying the Roswell (New Mexico) Daily Record, one of the first things Pat Davis did was turn off its online paywall. Then he invested $250 in Facebook ads to tell the newspaper’s social media followers that the Daily Record was still alive, and he started giving away free subscriptions to the print product.
These actions might be the stuff of nightmares for traditional publishers, but Davis is anything but traditional. His ideas are part of his master plan to breathe new life into struggling community newspapers in New Mexico by taking advantage of grant funding, growing readership at warp speed, and using economies of scale to expand pathways for civic engagement in the small towns spread across New Mexico’s vast landscape.
“Our front door to digital is open wide, and 100% of our digital products are free,” he says. “It’s important that readers don’t miss out on city council meetings just because they haven’t bought a subscription.”
Davis, who owns the New Mexico News Group believes the key to successful publishing is to build a solid readership and funding will follow through journalism grants, advertising and community support.
His custom-built publishing framework is designed to foster a media ecosystem in New Mexico where newspapers and news platforms amplify each other’s work to make an impact greater than any single outlet could do alone.
Along the way, he is perfecting a business plan rooted in sustainability and tailor made for local content. Each publication retains its brand and editorial independence with reporters covering their communities. The network fills in coverage of regional, state and national news and events and sells both digital and print advertising.
“We have to develop a sustainable media ecosystem, especially in a largely rural state where the distances are long and the communities are disconnected,” he says. “I believe we’ve built a good model for that.”
ROSWELL DAILY RECORD PRESERVED
The shutdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic six years ago led to the demise of many small businesses, including newspapers.
The legendary Roswell Daily Record sputtered along, steeped in history and defined by a great UFO mystery that spawned long-running conspiracy theories. Its owner, Barbara Beck, interviewed for NNA about a year ago, said she was passionate about keeping her family’s newspaper — and legacy — going.
But the newspaper was losing ground and had dropped its print frequency to weekly before finally grinding to a halt last July.
Davis and the New Mexico News Group stepped in immediately to pump new life back into the newspaper and are working to make it sustainable.
The newspaper was on the edge of profitability, he says. It only took a few weeks to right the ship. The next step is to make it sustainable for the long term.
After all, the family that owned it had kept it going for over a century, Davis says. The staff knew what needed to be done to succeed, and they had a plan for doing it, but they faced insurmountable challenges they could not overcome and ran out of steam.
"There’s nothing wrong with handing a newspaper over to another publisher to write its new chapter,” he says. “We just gave it a little juice, and I think that's what made the difference.”
The Roswell Daily Record’s biggest claim to fame came 78 years ago when it reported on the “Roswell Incident,” the alleged crash of a UFO just outside town.
Both the Daily Record and its long-defunct sister paper, the Roswell Morning Dispatch, broke the news about a flying disc that crashed into a field in June 1947. The Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release stating they had recovered a flying saucer, then quickly retracted that statement, claiming instead it was a weather balloon.
Over the decades following the crash, conspiracy theorists have fashioned a narrative that the U.S. government covered up the possibility that the crash involved an alien spacecraft and its extraterrestrial crew. Still, the world remains fascinated.
The Daily Record has been there to cover the narrative’s twists and turns and celebrate its campy anniversary while cultivating public’s fascination with the story.
Davis says the newspaper is much more than its UFO notoriety.
“The newspaper has a lively history, and there aren’t a lot of papers that can lay claim to starting a pop culture phenomenon,” he says. “But for most people who read the Roswell Daily Record, the day of the crash was just one day of many.”
The Daily Record has always been the kind of newspaper that covers the ordinary rhythm of life, publishing the news that readers cut out and post on refrigerator doors, hang on walls, and tuck inside family Bibles — marriages, births, graduations, deaths and everything in between. It publishes legal notices, runs ads for local businesses and public service announcements about food drives, festivals and community events. It covers local government and has told the community’s history as it unfolded every day for more than130 years.
The newspaper’s roots go back to 1891 when the semiweekly Roswell Record was launched. It competed with two other newspapers before buying them out in 1903, becoming the Roswell Daily Record.
Beck, a career educator, took the reins in 2015. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas Shearman, bought the newspaper in the 1930s, and her father, Robert Beck, joined the family business in 1947, a year before marrying Marjorie Shearman, the owner’s daughter.
Last year, Beck said the newspaper recorded a circulation of 12,000 and had dropped its print frequency to weekly. The new owner declined to provide current circulation numbers, stating only that he is trying to build back the newspaper’s readership and increase its frequency.
After taking over the Daily Record and offering free online viewing and a free subscription for a month, the newspaper got a big readership bump, gaining 50 new print subscribers almost immediately, many paid out of good will.
“Our online readership went up 22% in the first week after taking the paywall down, and we attracted some new advertisers who were seeing the newspaper again for the first time in their social media feeds,” he says. He also retained almost the entire staff and boosted their salaries. They’ll continue to serve their community, but some will also contribute to other publications in the network.
ROOTED IN PUBLIC SERVICE
Davis started his career in law enforcement 25 years ago, serving as a U.S. Capitol police officer and was in his rookie year during the deadly attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
After moving to New Mexico, where he earned a master’s degree in criminology and served as a lieutenant in the University of New Mexico police force, he made his way into the advocacy and public policy arena. A career in local politics followed, and Davis served as an elected Albuquerque city council member, including a term as president.
He went on to work as executive director of Progress Now New Mexico, a progressive advocacy organization. In 2015, he founded the New Mexico Political Report, the state’s first non-profit newsroom covering the state legislature and politics.
As newspapers began sinking during the COVID-19 shutdowns, Davis was building life rafts, starting with The Alibi, Albuquerque’s 30-year-old free alternative weekly newspaper, which folded due to deep ad-revenue losses. Davis led an attempt to purchase and save it, but the sale fell through, leading him to launch a replacement publication called The Paper and retain The Alibi’s staff.
Then came the Corrales Comment in 2022, which was ceasing publication after 40 years in business. He acquired and re-launched The Independent in Edgewood a year after it ended its 20-year run, and that same year, he acquired and expanded the Sandoval Signpost and resurrected the 50-year-old Santa Fe Reporter.
His Citizen Media Group (nmreports.org) is a non-profit arm that partners with local newsrooms in New Mexico to train and support journalists covering local news. It is also home to two projects: City Desk ABQ and the New Mexico Political Report.
Combined, his company owns eight news outlets and is eyeing a ninth. He also publishes a free newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers.
“We just started accumulating news platforms over time and accidentally built the state’s largest publishing network,” he says.
Six out of the eight publications have a print component, and most are weekly. Davis uses the economy of scale that comes along with a digital network to quickly revive struggling newspapers. The digital platforms publish news every day. The print products are like Sunday readers, he says, filled with features and evergreen news stories.
“We’ve moved all the overnights and the daily news and the police blotters, sports scores [and] local government meetings online,” he says. “Print is still king, representing 75-80% of our revenue in each of our newspapers and subsidizes the digital products.”
Donor revenue, sponsorships and corporate grants subsidize salaries and operations for the remote newspapers in small communities without enough donor revenue to support them.
“When we can publish eight newspapers with 40 journalists working across all those brands, sales folks selling into any or all of the publications and graphic designers working across the board, together they can attract larger grant funding,” he says. “We can take those big dollars and funnel them to the smaller papers, and that makes a difference.”
COVERING A VAST STATE
At 121,590 square miles, New Mexico has the fifth largest landmass in the country, and with 2.12 million residents, it’s also one of the least populated, ranking 45th in density with about 17 people per square mile. Albuquerque is the largest city with a population of over 555,000 residents.
The New Mexico Press Association lists 36 member newspapers on its website.
Most of Davis’ newspapers are clustered around Albuquerque, where the News Network has its headquarters. Roswell hovers close to the Texas border in the southeast, and Santa Fe is the farthest north with about a four-hour drive between the two towns. Printing presses are a rare commodity, with the Santa Fe New Mexican printing nearly all the state’s newspapers, according to Davis.
In 2024, The Sandoval Signpost and The Independent News each received a $100,000 Press Forward grant, enabling them to pay off debt and put more journalists to work. With coaching from LION Publishers, Blue Engine Collaborative and the New Mexico Local News Fund, Davis developed a business plan for putting sustainability first while building equity in the business. In 2025, he received a LION Product of the Year award.
Last March, New Mexico news outlets got a boost from the state legislature, which passed the Local Journalist Employment Tax Credit to help local news organizations retain and hire journalists, and the Local News Printer Tax Credit to support newspaper printing facilities.
Davis worries about relying too heavily on nonprofit dollars, which are plentiful as one-time funding for start-ups but don’t guarantee sustainability, he says. Instead, he strives to leverage local support and advertising with national philanthropic organizations.
So far, his strategy is working.
“Four years after starting in 2020, we had acquired four publications, and in the last 18 months, we've grown to eight, and I think we're going to be a little bigger than that by the end of the year,” he says. “We are growing faster and helping other communities, and that’s the fun part.
Teri Saylor is a writer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Contact her at terisaylor@hotmail.com. To learn more about Pat Davis and the New Mexico News Network, visit nm.news
