![[Photo of Carolyn Titus]](cover0729-titus.jpeg)
Photo by
Mark Lufkin
This wonder woman, with the ready wit and easy laugh, is Caroline Titus, who at 37 is just concluding her 10th month of running The Ferndale Enterprise as editor/publisher and co-owner with husband Stuart Titus, who also wears the hat of general manager at the Humboldt County Fairgrounds. They are, respectively, president and vice president of Cages Publishing Inc. That, bringing together the whole family, stands for Caroline, Abigail, 6; Grady, almost 4; Elizabeth, almost 10; and Stuart, 45.
Since taking over Oct. 1, 1998, Caroline Titus has revamped the paper's masthead (scrapping a generic rising sun in favor of a clean-cut look down Ferndale's Main Street); held paid circulation steady at 1,400 - not bad for a town with an official population of 1,430, which she assures me is right, "plus or minus a few cows, as they say," and boosted total readership to 3,800, in some cases, almost doubling street store sales.
She now regularly puts out a six-page paper, up two pages from previous years. She has also brought back and enlivened some of the paper's oldtime folksiness, while at the same time perhaps startling some of the oldtimers with hard-hitting news stories and editorials. And all this with just a 3 1/2-woman staff.
This is not to slight the vice president. Caroline says, "I have a great husband, who comes home at lunchtime ... and helps pick up the kids or do whatever." The "whatever," as Stuart confides, includes being "called on when there are some heavy things to be moved and when the garbage needs to be taken out." He adds with a wry smile: "So goes the title of vice president."
Stuart also writes an occasional fairgrounds column - "about as often as Caroline needs that one more story to fill a space," he says.
When asked if Stuart sometimes makes the lunch he comes home for, Caroline grins, saying, "Yeah, he can make a pretty good can of soup."
The two of them obviously enjoy an easy-going banter.
"It's a joke at our house," Caroline says. "People give us compliments, 'Oh, the paper's just great.' And he'll say, 'Thanks very much,' and I'll always nudge him, 'What do you do?'
"Our other joke is that I'll come in Tuesday night, at midnight or 2 in the morning, and I've got the layout sheets, and he always says, 'Oh, let me proof this for you.' Well, he doesn't want to proof it. He wants to be the first to read it ... and I'll say, 'That's why you married me; that's why we bought the business, so you could see it first."
When I talk to him at his fairgrounds office, Stuart, a native son who also served one term as mayor (1984-1986), was quick to admit his minimal role in The Enterprise: "Caroline and her staff deserve all the credit."
That staff comprises an office manager, June Toste, who has been with The Enterprise since 1987, when it was owned and edited by Elizabeth "Liz" Poston McHarry; a production manager, Norma Lynch, who came aboard a year later. (Actually, she was hired by Toste, who recalls with a laugh: "Whenever she did something wrong, Liz would tell me, 'You hired her; you tell her.' ") And then that fractional member of the team, Jake Drake, the paper's gung-ho part-time advertising sales person - although you won't see her identified as such. One week's issue said she was "well rested," while another said, enigmatically, "has white legs."
Caroline explains: "When we took over the paper, I guess she didn't like 'advertising representative,' so every week we've given her a new title, depending on what's going on in the Enterprises's life and her life."
 (courtesy of the Ferndale Enterprise) |
| |
 (courtesy of the Ferndale Enterprise) |
 (courtesy of the Ferndale Enterprise) |
It's a part of the paper's whimsical oldtime, small-town flavor, like the Quote of the Week that runs in a box above the masthead - one recent kicker was Mayor Benemann's "I deal in reality sandwiches" - or the "home of" line that runs under the Main Street view of the Victorian Village in the masthead.
"In the seventies they used to do the 'home of' in The Enterprise, and we brought that back," Titus says. "Now, to someone who does not understand Ferndale, they may think that is really corny. But that has been one of the most successful things we have done." Every week it's a different person or a couple - or an animal - whose home it is, right up there at the top of the front page.
"People love that," Titus notes as she pulls a bulky file folder from a drawer in her office desk. "I get letters ... you know, it's made their week ... I've done long-time residents, natives, new people. We seem to concentrate on the older widows. There are just such great women in this town.
"Here's one (from) Elva Peers - she's been a subscriber for 52 years: "Yes, Ferndale's my home and now I love it. I saw my name in the headlines; I was so thrilled ..."
Of course at the head of this 3 1/2-woman staff is Caroline Titus, who beside gathering and writing the news, taking the photos (with her 35-year-old Pentax), lining up columnists (one of the most popular is Kathy Major, who writes under the name of "Humboldt Jones"), and banging out the editorials, is also "heavily involved" in selling ads. Most recently she has had to get involved also as production manager after Norma Lynch hurt her back lifting a mail bag and isn't expected back on the job for at least six weeks. Caroline, luckily enough, was able to hire a newcomer with daily newspaper experience, Susan Camarda, to help with the news coverage.
Titus herself has some impressive bona fides. She worked on high school and college newspapers, was graduated (in 1985) from Sacramento State University with a government/journalism major, and had a 10-year career in radio and television reporting in the state capital. "Which was great training for this job," she points out, "because when you're having to produce, you know, 15-20 news stories on radio in three hours, you learn how to write fast and come up with stories ... great training."
Before switching to television, doing the news for KRBK, Channel 31 in Sacramento, she did news-talk for Sacramento radio stations KGNR and KFBK. At the latter station she worked with Rush Limbaugh, who has his beginnings there. Of course, this raised an eyebrow or two, but, she assured me: "He's a very nice person." (Okay, so nobody's perfect.)
This was obviously the big time for Caroline Slark (her maiden name), then in her 20s, and aspiring to even bigger times. She went to Iceland for KFBK to cover the Gorbachev-Reagan summit in 1986, and in Sacramento she covered everything from politics and the Capitol to floods and other disasters.
So what in the world brought her to this tiny, remote town on the North Coast?
There is a brief pause, and then, in an offhand quip, she says: "Oh, I met a man." That of course was Stuart Paul Titus, who was also enrolled then in Sacramento State. (He was graduated in 1987, with a bachelor of science in business administration.)
"He said, 'I'm from a little town up north called Ferndale,'" she recalls, "and I'd never heard of it. And he brought me up here, and I said, 'Well, this is cute, but I could never live here.' I'm a career woman. I'm on TV, I've got a big career and places to go. I was going to go back to Los Angeles." (That's where she'd gone to high school and junior college.)
She goes on: "And as life would have it, both my parents died within 17 months of each other, from cancer." Caroline, born in Shepperton, England, had come with her family to Los Angeles when she was 10. Her mother, Monica Slark, was 59 when she died, and her father, Fred, 66. (Caroline has two brothers, Freddie, who operates a restaurant in Las Vegas, and Christopher, who does custom woodwork for executive airplanes in Simi Valley.)
By the time her parents died, Caroline and Stuart, married in Sacramento in 1988, had a 6-month-old baby, and Stuart, who'd been working in the fair industry in Stockton and Santa Rosa, had just learned that the job he'd dreamed of - managing the fair in his home town - had come open.
Caroline said recently, "You know, I could care less at that point, just going through the grief and having the little baby. So that when all that was over, this sounded good. I just wasn't motivated to go on. So I quit my job... and here we are."
They moved to Ferndale in 1990, and Caroline went on to have two more children, becoming "a full-time, stay-at-home Mom."
Still, she kept a hand in the news game, occasionally writing for Liz McHarry at The Enterprise, "stringing" for radio stations in Sacramento and also doing a once-a-month tabloid called North Coast Kids for the Times-Standard. That last, of course, was a natural for her.
As she says of her present dual role: "No. 1 mom, and No. 2, editor, "she's frequently doing both at the same time. "I'm at every event at school, of course, taking photos for the paper and watching my kids ... I'm going to the parades because my kids are in them... So I've got a camera around my neck and I'm taking photos as well as making sure my kids have their hats and costumes on."
In 1995, when Elizabeth McHarry, after a 13-year tenure, sold The Enterprise to Peter and Irene Hannaford, Caroline Titus went to work for them as managing editor, later moving up to editor in chief. The Hannafords have a summer home in Petrolia, but they live in Washington, D.C. Irene Hannaford is a great-granddaughter of Ferndale pioneer Joseph Russ.
It was under the Hannaford ownership that Caroline Titus began winning The Enterprise its four awards from the California Newspaper Publishers' Association, for newspapers of 4,300-and-under circulation. Then, just in the past week she learned that the National Newspaper Association has awarded The Enterprise second place for best editorial among non-dailies with circulation under 5,000.
It was also during that time that Titus established her credentials as an editor dedicated to reporting the news regardless of what sacred cow might be involved.
Especially memorable was a series of articles she wrote about the Bertha Russ Lytel Foundation, which Caroline herself describes as Ferndale's Guardian Angel. It was established with millions of dollars bequested in the 1970s by the durable Bertha Russ Lytel - she lived to be 98 - who was a daughter of pioneer Joseph Russ, and a great aunt, incidentally, of Irene Hannaford.
The foundation is generous to a fare-thee-well: A $35,000 scholarship goes to the top graduate of Ferndale High School every year, the Ferndale Repertory Theater and the county's fairgrounds race track are beneficiaries, hard-up senior residents have been quietly helped to pay their bills and the foundation picked up the tab for a drainage tax that citizens were confronted with. As Stuart Titus observes: "The foundation probably touches the lives of everyone in Ferndale."
But Caroline's series of stories, which won statewide awards for environmental reporting, called for the city government's involvement in a logging plan proposed by the foundation in the hundreds of acres it owns on the hills around Ferndale.
"My whole contention was that we need to talk about it, and the City Council needs to get involved and review it ... The results from our stand were that a Forest Practice Commission was established in Ferndale, any logging plan that could affect Ferndale is run through City Hall ... (and) the California Department of Forestry publicly said it was going to require a zero-net discharge on all logging plans that could affect this area.
"And just because I dared to write about it, I had businesses canceling advertising, saying this does not belong in the paper. There were some people who felt that I was implicating (the foundation) by even talking about it, by even saying they have these plans for the hills around us ... This was like going up against your mother. It was a very lonely time."
To his credit, that kind of reporting didn't raise any objections from owner Peter Hannaford. Perhaps it was because he was more interested in doing his thing on the Washington political scene.
As The Enterprise's new editor/publisher expressed it: "What people didn't want in their paper ..." - and make no mistake, The Enterprise IS their paper, as Caroline Titus will tell you - "... when Peter Hannaford owned it - and it was clearly stated - he ran lots of Washington editorials. This is a community paper, and people clearly said, 'We want a community paper.'"
Editor Titus ran into another barrage of flak during the Hannaford reign when she covered the trial of Stan Dixon, a Ferndale native and Humboldt County 1st district supervisor, on a petty theft charge - which was ultimately dismissed.
"We did the story," Caroline reports, "we did it accurately, we got the facts correct that not necessarily other papers did; it was above the fold, and it created a firestorm. Half the people said, 'This does not belong in the paper. He's a native son.' The other half said, 'You've got to put it in; it's the news of the county.'"
Another lonely time.
"And in the very end, his wife and he stopped me on the street, and said, 'Thank you for the fair coverage.'"
It was the first time - but not the last - that Caroline Titus was to hear: "The Waldners are rolling in their graves."
George and Hazel Waldner owned The Enterprise for an incredible 47 years. I recently spent the better part of an hour in the Ferndale Museum scanning the first six months' issues of 1975, picked at random. Dullsville. I did not come across a single editorial, although I did note that George Waldner in one of his weekly "Random Thoughts" columns printed an editorial from the Tulsa (Okla.) Tribune on something that must have seemed as far afield to Ferndale citizens as Peter Hannaford's Washington pieces did later.
Nor were there any stories on anything remotely approaching a scandal or controversy. It's hard to imagine Ferndale going six months without a controversy of some sort.
Caroline Titus, who often marvels at the 121 years of Enterprise history, remembers having the Waldners drawn to her attention again when she and Stuart took over the paper.
"Boy, that was really a great paper when the Waldners had it!" she would hear from oldtimers. She adds, "And, then, of course, I got the 'They'll be spinning in their graves' thing."
She goes on: "I have great respect for the Waldners, because for nearly 50 years ... I mean, they didn't make any money, couldn't have. And they did it because they loved the paper, and I understand that... Anyway, you know the paper back then, it was pretty much all 'good' stuff about Ferndale. And I'm sure there are some people who want the paper to just be that.
"But that's not what I'm about. All I'm about is honest, fair, objective reporting. There are some ugly things that happen in Ferndale, and there's a whole lot of positive things that happen. But it's not my job to just be a community cheerleader. I AM a community cheerleader. But I can't say, 'Well, I'm not running this. It's not very 'nice.'"
Coming into the game now as publisher is "a whole new world" for her, she admits. "I used to sit on the editorial side, and, you know, you would hear from the business side, 'Oh, we can't put that in the paper.' When you've got also to make the paper viable, you learn about all these things."
That, she says, explains why The Enterprise, along with other newspapers, charges for the obituaries people want to put in - the kind, which, as she puts it are saying, "He was a wonderful and sweet and lovable man."
"Now I've got the publisher hat on," she says. "Now I know why they charge for obituaries. You've gotta make money. To have a small paper like this in a small town with no growth, you've gotta be pretty creative (with advertising) ... It's amazing that this town had its own paper for this long. The town's population hasn't changed in a 100 and some years, you know...You have to pay the bills. Fifty cents a copy doesn't pay the bills."
At another point in one of our interviews, she remarks: "I'm learning now about the market for community papers. Most of them are run by husband and wife teams, and I can see why that would work, financially. Not everybody would do this. Financially, it's tough. Every week you have to be out there selling the paper. You know, we are always asking people - my poor friends - I say, 'Did you use that coupon? Did you tell 'em you saw it in The Enterprise?' That's what it's all about. No matter how credible, how many awards the paper wins, it doesn't pay the bills."
So, I ask, "How are you doing?"
She pauses only a moment before telling me: "None of your business." She joins me in laughing. Nothing bashful about Caroline Titus.
Then she adds: "Let me just say that in six-eight months, the support for The Enterprise has been great. And we have turned it around, much quicker than we ever expected to. But it is still really tough, and after 121 years you've gotta be pretty creative. We don't have the numbers that the Beacon has, we don't have the number that you guys (North Coast Journal) have. So we've got to really be creative in ways to get advertisers to understand that if they want to reach Ferndale and Petrolia and this area, The Enterprise is where it's at."
So, in with the hard news she mixes the homey, small-town features - such as a story on the Portuguese oldtimer who'd been making a locally famed sweetbread for 50 years and is sharing her recipe with Enterprise readers, or the one about a 92-year-old Mattole woman who recently showed the folks at a Mattole Grange event how to make a really good pot of beans.
"I'll tell you," Caroline tells me, "talking from one journalist to another, this is the most rewarding type of journalism. In school they don't say to you, "You know what, you really want to go work at some dinky community paper.' Nobody plans to do that. We want to go to the L.A. Times, that's where we want to be.
"But this is the most rewarding - not financially - because every week you make a difference. Every week you make a difference. Every week, if you've got it wrong, you're going to hear about it two seconds after it hits the street. And if you dare to show your face ... I mean, I laugh because every Wednesday, you know, the paper hits the streets about noon, and I'm a mom again. I've got this week done, and I'm in the Valley Grocery buying bananas or whatever, and those women are there, and if you've got it wrong, you're gonna hear about it ... If you made a difference or if you made somebody happy. You know, I can remember being on radio and TV, but I never heard anything - 'That was a great story' or 'It was a lousy story.'"
Small town or not, Caroline Titus has kept on her big-city toes. Case in point: The Enterprises's March 25 story on the miniature Ferndale created in the tourist attraction of Legoland in Carlsbad down in Southern California. This small-town weekly newspaper scooped everybody in sight.
As Titus tells the story: "I got a call from somebody in L.A. who gets the paper ..." - one of The Enterprise's 303 out-of-Humboldt-County subscribers - "... and who said, 'You're not going to believe this: My friend went to 'Ferndale' in Legoland.' Of course, I said, 'What's Legoland?' She said, 'They built Ferndale.' I said, 'No, I don't think so.' 'Yeah, seriously.'"
So The Enterprise editor calls Legoland: "And they said, 'Oh yeah, we built your town out of a million Lego blocks.' I said, 'Did you tell anybody?' 'No, I guess we didn't.' Apparently the Lego people came here four years ago, took hundreds of photographs, saw all the Danish people buried in the cemetery - and Lego is a Danish company - and thought, 'This is great. In our Miniland we're going to pick one small town in the United States.'
"This is Monday, about noon. You know, you get a whiff of a scoop like that ... Look, I get excited just thinking about it!"
After trying unsuccessfully to get Legoland to e-mail her some photos, she brainstormed with Karen Pingitore, president of Ferndale's Chamber of Commerce and owner of Ferndale Clothing Co. (she's also one of The Enterprises's stable of columnists, writing "Chamber Notes"). Pingitore got through to a friend in Southern California and persuaded her to buy a disposable camera, shoot the pictures in Legoland and ship it to Ferndale by FedEx in time for The Enterprise's Tuesday news deadline. Tuesday morning Caroline picked up the camera in Eureka, got the photos developed and the story and photos were in the paper for Wednesday morning's distribution - leaving all the competition with egg on its face.
"And nobody knew about this, in L.A. or anywhere," she relates. "And the next thing you know, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat wants photos, The Humboldt Beacon (property of Humboldt Printing, which also prints The Enterprise) wanted a photo, and the Times-Standard came out and took pictures of our photos."
Caroline beams, and says: "Those scoops - that's what drives you as a reporter. The Humboldt Creamery (in Fernbridge) got a nationwide contract with Costco. We were the first one to report on that. That's a huge story, you know; that affects everybody here."
Becoming a publisher, with an eye out for advertising, hasn't dimmed her sight for the news, controversial or not, or kept her from taking an editorial stance on questionable political moves in the town.
Early in June, for example, she took the City Council to task for proposing to select by secret ballot a replacement for Councilman Jim Aste, who resigned to go to law school at the University of Idaho.
"Voting by secret ballot? We don't think so," wrote Editor Titus. She cited the Ralph M. Brown Act that covers the public's right-to-know, and said: "This is a public position the council will be filling. It's imperative citizens know how council members vote. It's called open government."
As a result, she is able to report: "The council consulted the city attorney, and then agreed with my stand."
She went on to say: "I'm a journalist first. I think publishers are a whole different breed if they've never been a journalist, and vice versa. I would never compromise my journalistic integrity or ethics because of advertising.
"That doesn't mean to say that I don't think about it and that I don't think about things differently, because if there's no money to pay the bills, there's no paper. But - you're a journalist - it's like a doctor's creed. You just don't do it."
Right now, Ferndale faces the question of whether or not to allow Nilsen Co. to close down its separately located feed and hardware stores downtown and combine them in a new, single building at the entrance to the Victorian Village. The pros and cons are at it again.
"We wrote an editorial when they first proposed relocating," Titus notes, "basically saying we hate to see them leave downtown, but we sure as heck want to see them stay within the city limits for the sales tax reasons. So, they're going to either move to this (new) location or move out of town.
"Our editorial stance as well was that all the proper procedures need to take place. Whether it turns out to be a General Plan review, whatever, it's going to take a long time. Our basic editorial stance was (it's) better not to lose 'em."
Before the dust settles, probably months from now, it is likely to be "a humdinger" of a controversy, as one observer sees it. And very likely Caroline Titus and The Enterprise will find themselves in the middle of it, as usual. Once again, perhaps, one of those lonely times.
Comments? E-mail the Journal: ncjour@northcoast.com
