MONAHANS — The 15-year-old pressman said he would offer to shake hands if his weren’t covered in black ink.
Charlie Briggs — blonde with braces, a knife in a leather sheath strapped to his hip — has only been operating the 1969 Goss Community Press at The Monahans News since August, but he knows his way around the machine well. “What I like about it is there’s no computers,” Charlie said. “Everything’s mechanical.”
It’s Wednesday, or “press day,” the day Charlie prints The Monahans News, as well as six other weekly regional papers including the Pecos Enterprise, McCamey News, Crane News, Jeff Davis Mountain Dispatch, The Big Bend Sentinel and The Presidio International.
But the press is no longer operating at its full capacity. It was designed to print up to 10,000 newspapers in one run, but these days even Charlie’s largest order — 2,500 copies of The Big Bend Sentinel — comes nowhere close to that heyday ideal.
At their height around five years ago, the press was printing 11 weekly papers, said Smokey, Charlie’s dad and the owner and publisher of The Monahans News and Pecos Enterprise, who also owns the press. “It’s part of the overall decline in the newspaper industry,” Smokey said. “As the industry has tightened up, more and more people are always looking for a way to get by on less.”
Since 2005, the United States has lost almost 2,900 newspapers, the vast majority of which are weeklies, often the sole provider of local news in small and mid-size communities, according to a 2023 report titled “The State of Local News” published by Northwestern University. The majority of Far West Texas counties are classified as “news deserts,” meaning there is either one surviving local news outlet or none at all.
Smokey, 58, has seen several local papers and, subsequently, printing presses shut down in the past 20 years. “When we first got here in ‘99 Pecos had a press, Monahans had a press, Winkler County had a press, McCamey had a press,” Smokey said. “Quite a few of those are no longer around.”
He estimates his business’ gross profit has decreased by 50% in the past five years due to so many papers folding and the price of raw materials rising. “We have lost probably 25% of our accounts — they just went out of business,” Smokey said. “Of our existing accounts, almost all have cut back page counts and copy counts.”
But a recent visit to The Monahans News office revealed a resilient, lively, familial work environment — one focused on preserving, rather than mourning, the legacy of local news.
The Monahans News office was built in the 1930s and houses both the newspaper office and printing press. Photo by Maisie Crow. 
Maria Gerardo loads copies of The Big Bend Sentinel and The Presidio International into the trunk of a car for distribution. Photo by Maisie Crow. 
Charlie Briggs amidst 800- to 1,000-pound rolls of newsprint. Photo by Maisie Crow. 
Rey Guzman prepares to grab freshly folded newspapers from the press. Photo by Maisie Crow. 
Inky hand prints decorate the walls of the industrial back room where the printing press lives. Photo by Maisie Crow. 
15-year-old pressman Charlie Briggs loads a laser-printed aluminum plate onto the 1969-built Goss Community Press. Photo by Maisie Crow. 
Smokey and Charlie Briggs receive digital files of area newspapers for printing on Wednesdays. Staff photo by Maisie Crow.
Smokey’s partner in business, and in life, is his wife Laura, the chief bookkeeper, who Smokey said is “the only reason the IRS hasn’t arrested me or I haven’t gone broke.” Like his three older sisters before him, Charlie was “conscripted” to work for his dad. The kids split their time homeschooling, helping out on the family ranch and working at the press and newspaper offices.
“We were raised to fill in any position we can,” said Dixie, Smokey’s 18-year-old daughter who is currently assigned to writing and advertising. The mixed environment makes for a well-rounded upbringing, Dixie said. Charlie will often use down time between press runs to work on school assignments. “There’s a lot of math and chemistry that goes into this,” Dixie said. “He’s learning real world problems as well as what they teach him in school.”
When the previous lead pressman quit this past summer, Smokey tapped Charlie for the role, in part, because finding someone to learn and operate the press is difficult given its complex nature. “She’s got a lot of tight tolerances on her,” Smokey said of the press. There’s also an abundance of high-paying, oil-field jobs in the area that are hard to compete with, he said.
“It’s a very skilled blue collar job. It’s not something you learn in a week, or two weeks or a month,” Smokey said. “I had to teach myself that press. I’ve been working on automobiles and farm machinery and stuff my whole life. It was a lot.”
There’s also the sense of urgency that comes with a deadline-driven business — editors send pages to the press Wednesday afternoon, and couriers pick them up within hours in order to distribute papers across each community by morning. “It’s got to happen,” Smokey said. “There’s no putting it off to tomorrow.”
So the willing, young Charlie was offered the job. As Smokey recalls, that night at the dinner table “with the confidence you can only have when you are 15,” he put his hand on his dad’s shoulder and told him, “Don’t worry, I got this.”
Despite initial concerns over whether or not he could handle the responsibility, Charlie “had it from the get go” and even read the press manual from cover to cover. “I’m his dad, and I was very pleasantly surprised,” Smokey said. “He didn’t have to learn it that well. He could have blown that off.”
Months later, the 15-year-old lead pressman operates the iron press — which is so heavy they had to pour a special 18-inch deep foundation to withstand the weight and vibrations — with ease. “I think it is pretty satisfying to run it up and everything, have a machine from the ‘60s be working just fine today,” Charlie said.
Pages are first laser printed onto aluminum plates, which are then loaded onto the press — four units consisting of a series of rollers, newsprint, ink and ionized water run by a motor that’s speedometer measures thousands of papers per hour. Bells ring to alert the pressman the machine is starting up and to get his hands out of the way.
Charlie does routine checks, adjusting rollers — in increments of 1/1000 of an inch — making sure “the web” of papers above is tight but not ripping, turning on ink and water, then increasing the printing speed. “It’s completely manual,” Dixie said. “Think of it as like, driving stick.”
Charlie picks up a freshly-printed paper to assess its quality. “Right now he’s checking all of the page numbers, making sure that everything got put on correctly, everything’s lined up correctly, none of the pages are being cut in half, double checking his adjustments on the press and making sure everything is folding correctly,” Dixie explained.
As far as Charlie is concerned, how the ink manages to only stick to the laser-printed text is nothing short of “witchcraft.” Charlie is not one to pick up and read a paper after he prints it, he said. “I actually have a curse now. I can’t look at a paper without trying to find defects in it,” he said.
He treats himself to donuts on press days, and is at home in the company of fellow pressman and “flyboy” 82-year-old Rey Guzman, who’s job is to stack papers from the automatic folder and wrap them in twine for distribution.
The industrial back room where the press lives at The Monahans News office is complete with 800- to 1,000-pound rolls of newsprint, an old dark room, discarded papers awaiting pick up from a piñata maker in El Paso and the evidence of ink. Black handprints from a previous visiting class decorate a white wall and traces of ink are visible on the ceiling’s air vents.
Guzman — wearing suspenders, glasses and a red, white and blue head bandana — and Charlie take a load off and wait for the next round of pages to come in. Like most people who work for Smokey, Guzman is a character. He tells Charlie about the legend of the pink bluebonnet, an old Hispanic folktale about the bluebonnets downstream of the Alamo growing pink due to the bloodshed at the historic fort.
Guzman shares his affinity for storytelling with Monahans News reporter Jan Cranfill — who is fond of calling him “my Rey.” She used to kill time with him at the office before she was offered a job throwing a paper route. Now, to save an ailing shoulder, she works as a reporter covering everything from human interest pieces to county government.
Neither intended to wind up in the newspaper business, but Smokey is known to pull people out of retirement and home-grow his talent.
Smokey has been in the Permian Basin since the ‘90s, working as the editor for both The Monahans News and Pecos Enterprise and publishing a weekly column titled “Sage Views.” He took over the Monahans News, and its 1930s-built office, more than 20 years ago in 2003.
The beige building with lattice windows isn’t much to look at from the outside, but its interior has the familiar country kitsch of a small town Texas restaurant, where an appreciation of the Second Amendment is on full display. There’s a black and white checkered floor and signs declaring, “We don’t dial 911” and “There’s a place for all god’s creatures … right next to the potatoes and gravy.”
The press pit — where Smokey’s handful of reporters sit — feels well lived in. Photoshopped images making fun of various staff members are tacked up on the wall. On one desk, piled high with papers and snacks, an idling police scanner comes to life.
Printed, bound archives of The Monahans News dating back to 1956 are housed at the office. A Briggs family tradition is to look up the price of bread the year you were born. A flip through just one year of the paper reveals a flurry of news, from arrests, politics and oil and gas notices to spelling bee results, honor roll student listings and the senior center newsletter.
The boss’s corner office is dimly-lit, a desk lamp the only source of light in the room. On one wall sits an overflowing bookcase next to a contemporary take on the “Come and Take It” flag made famous by the Battle of Gonzales, a firearm in place of the traditional cannon.
Smokey has an eclectic background and, as he puts it, “fell into” the newspaper business. He has degrees in history, mass communications and law, and served stints in the National Guard and as an attorney in Lubbock. One day his father, who had worked as a journalist, called to tell him about the publisher opening in Pecos. Running two papers and the press has been a good mix for him, he said.
“I love where I’m at in this business,” Smokey said. “I get to use my brain. I get to write and use some leadership skills and, at the same time, work on machinery.”
“I like having a press. Nobody can tell you you can’t print something if you own your own press,” he added.
After 25 years in the newspaper business, he’s had his fair share of run-ins with displeased readers and sources. “They hate me,” he said, quickly adding, “It depends on the day.” He jokes that the lattice work on the window of his office serves as a “molotov cocktail barrier.” But holding public officials accountable is part of what makes the job fun for him, he said. “What I have learned is that I outlive city councils, mayors, commissioners, county judges, sheriffs and police chiefs.”
Cultivating a strong team of reporters to help cover the region has been tough, he said. He has been trying to hire a managing editor for the Pecos Enterprise for two years. “There’s nothing sexy about writing anymore, apparently,” Smokey said. “Writing’s hard and the pay sucks.”
According to the State of Local News report recently published by Northwestern University, Texas lost 65% of its journalists from 2005 to 2022. The report states that, until recently, 85% of the news that made national headlines was first published in a local paper, due to the fact that “newspapers employed twice as many local journalists (75,000 in 2005) as any other medium and therefore covered many smaller communities overlooked by television and radio.”
“Somebody needs to write the news, somebody needs to report,” Smokey said. “We almost have a world without reporters now, for all intents and purposes, but one where there literally aren’t any reporters and no one is actually reporting the news? That’s frightening.”
In the meantime, while technology advances and the industry tries to find a way to make money off of digital news, newspapers still “work beautifully,” Smokey said. “They are effective.”
The business may be a “slight labor of love,” Smokey said, but it has always managed to turn a profit. Last year, he started 432 Printing, a commercial business that helps bring in additional revenue for the press.
He is proud of the quality of work his team provides. Monahans News is a black and white press, and prints on wider, 27.5-inch newsprint, as opposed to some presses which print on 24-inch newsprint. “All of our customers are mom and pop-owned and they love their newspapers. They’re not corporate outfits that can only see next month’s bottom line,” Smokey said. “They have a love for their publication so they want it to look good, which is why we can afford to print on bigger format, better paper.”
Smokey has printed The Big Bend Sentinel and The Presidio International for as long as he’s owned the business, he said, the working relationship likely dating back to the ‘80s.
With the Briggs’ help, the weekly print editions of The Big Bend Sentinel and The Presidio International reach around 3,300 subscribers all over Texas and the United States, in Oregon, Florida, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and beyond. Newspaper staff recently received a note from someone who has had a subscription for 67 years.
After The Big Bend Sentinel and The Presidio International newspapers are sent to press, Maria Gerardo and Marisa Chacon make the trip to Monahans each Wednesday afternoon to pick up the papers from Charlie and Rey and add inserts before heading back to the tri-county area. In addition to the four-hour round trip to the press, Gerardo and Chacon make several stops in Alpine, Fort Davis and Marfa before calling it a night. When things are going smooth, Gerardo said, they are done by 11 p.m., but hiccups have caused them to run as late as 2 a.m.
Stacks of bound papers are dropped at front doors of hotels, restaurants, stores and gas stations in each community. They are also hand labeled and delivered to post offices which distribute them to P.O. boxes and residences. Thursday morning papers make their way down to Presidio for distribution.
By some magic, papers get to where they need to go. Every week Gerardo and Chacon leave out a copy of the week’s paper for one faithful reader who picks it up — placing the $1 payment under a rock — from The Sentinel early Thursday morning before the coffee shop opens.