A teen just bought a newspaper, because why not

He's going to read some textbooks about journalism.
 By 
Sasha Lekach
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

They say millennials don't read newspapers, but one just bought a small-town weekly.

A 19-year-old purchased the Central Delta Argus-Sun, a weekly newspaper serving a small county east of Little Rock, Arkansas, for an undisclosed amount.

The paper, based in Brinkley, is one year older than its new owner, Hayden Taylor, who admittedly has zero experience in the news industry and no college degree. He graduated high school in 2015 before attending a small parochial college for a year.

While he told the local Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he'll get some textbooks and read about journalism and the newspaper industry, his main focus will be on "how to make the bottom line work." Oh, what a familiar line.

Taylor, who was on his high school's varsity football team, plans to go deep on local sports, like every small-town publisher before him.

He may be part of the Facebook and social media generation, but getting the paper online doesn't seem to be a top priority. He told the Democrat-Gazette that an online presence will come eventually, but it will only be available for its roughly 1,800 subscribers -- remember that bottom line, folks. The paper's website is currently inactive and its last Facebook post is from July when Pokémon Go fever was at an all-time high. Those were the days.

Taylor's father is on the local city council, and his family, which owns several buildings in the commercial district, has been in the community for five generations. So Taylor is already well connected in the community. His mother, a local businesswoman, also plans to help him run the paper. She has already posted on Facebook requesting birth announcements.

His intentions seem sincere, but Taylor should add "conflicts of interest" to his reading list, just to be safe.

Mashable Image
Sasha Lekach

Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.

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