How the Poconos built a free press by hand, made it something worth believing in, and watched Wall Street bleed it dry.
The All-Nighter
Picture Honesdale on the night of February 6, 1878.
The county commissioners want a new courthouse, and they want to raise taxes to pay for it. A group of Wayne County citizens has decided the two papers already in town, one Democratic and one Republican, won’t fight it for them. So they did what people did back then. They built a newspaper.
They recruited an editor, Benjamin Franklin Haines, away from the Hancock Herald across the New York line, and knocked on doors until they had roughly 900 paid subscribers, people who put money down for a paper that didn’t exist yet. That night a crew worked nearly until dawn, hand-feeding paper through a press, printing some 3,000 copies of a four-page sheet called the Wayne Independent.
The name — Independent — was the mission statement: this paper answers to no party. That paper would publish for 141 years.
This is the story of Pocono journalism: born fighting, grown up, brought to its peak, and killed not by the internet or apathy but by outsiders who never set foot here.
Our story may start in 1878. Pocono journalism doesn’t. By the time that crew fired up the press, the region had been printing for sixty years. It started in 1818 in Bethany, then the county seat, when a Connecticut transplant named James Manning published the Wayne County Mirror, Wayne County’s first newspaper and the earliest known anywhere in what is now the Poconos. Milford’s first paper, the Eagle of the North, followed in the late 1820s; today’s Pike County Dispatch still claims 1826 on its masthead, though that first venture folded and the Dispatch’s real lineage traces to the Pike County Democrat, founded in 1849. Then the floodgates. The Wayne County Herald in 1832, the Jeffersonian Republican out of Milford in 1840, the Stroudsburg Daily Times in 1894. Papers born, dying, merging, and switching sides for sixty years before the Wayne Independent ran its first page. The men who pulled that all-nighter weren’t inventing anything. They were joining a tradition three generations deep: when the Poconos had a fight, the Poconos started a paper.
The Believers (1840–1900)
Let’s be honest about the early papers, because the honest version beats the myth. They were not watchdogs. They were weapons: openly partisan instruments in an age when every masthead declared its allegiance like a regiment declaring its colors. You didn’t buy the objective paper. There was no such thing. You bought the paper that fought for your side.
Nobody fought longer than Theodore Schoch. In 1840, Whig leaders in Pike County faced a problem: northeastern Pennsylvania was Democrat country, ten votes to one. Starting a Whig paper here wasn’t a business plan. It was, as one historian put it, an act of faith. They started it anyway, and within a year a 26-year-old farm boy named Schoch took over the Jeffersonian Republican and moved it to Stroudsburg. He would run it for fifty-nine years, setting his own type by hand, pulling the lever on the same secondhand Smith press he bought in 1847, never missing a deadline from 1841 until his death in 1900, a month short of fifty-nine years at the paper. He lost most of his fights; Monroe County voted five-to-one against everything he stood for. He printed anyway. When his district finally elected a congressman from his party in 1896, the 82-year-old wrote: “If I should live to be a hundred, I couldn’t have more glory to think of than this.”
That was the currency of the age. Not money; there was none in it. Belief: the stubborn conviction that your town deserved to hear the other side even when that side lost every election for fifty years.
Were these papers blind? Absolutely. Corruption on your own side wasn’t news; corruption on the other side was the whole front page. Honesdale’s papers flipped allegiances like flags in wartime. The Honesdale Democrat became the Republic in January 1864, switching parties mid-Civil War as the country tore itself apart over slavery. This was the same county that produced David Wilmot, whose Wilmot Proviso tried to ban slavery in the territories and helped set the nation on the road to war. The biggest moral fight in American history ran straight through Wayne County’s newsprint.
Flawed, partisan, blind by allegiance. And alive. Every paper was run by a person you could find, argue with, and shake hands with on Main Street. When Schoch’s obituary ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer, it speculated he was the oldest active editor in continuous service in America. A hand-press operator in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. That’s what this region built.
The Town Builders (1894–1946)
By the 1890s the papers began to change. The party warfare cooled, and something warmer took its place: papers that saw themselves as partners in their towns’ futures.
In 1894 George Hughes founded the Stroudsburg Daily Times. Four years later, on its fourth anniversary in April 1898, he ran a 12-page illuminated edition the paper boasted was a world record, with Hughes signing an affidavit before a justice of the peace to verify it. A mill-town daily claiming a world record, notarized. They believed they mattered. Because they did. Honesdale in 1908 supported three papers at once, one small canal town rich enough in ideas and stubbornness to sustain a newspaper war for decades.
And here’s the detail that says it all. On April 17, 1912, the Citizen had the biggest story in the world on its desk: the Titanic had gone down. It ran it: eleven paragraphs, one column. The wider headline across the page belonged to the Board of Trade’s plans “To Develop Wayne County and Make a Larger and Better Honesdale.” The greatest disaster of the age took second billing to the future of Honesdale. When was the last time an outlet covering this region put your town’s future above the national noise machine? These papers had their priorities exactly where a local paper’s belong: at hom
Growing Up (1946–2000)
In 1946 a newspaperman named James H. Ottaway Sr. bought the Stroudsburg daily, then called The Record, and Pocono journalism grew up. Ottaway was chain ownership done right. His own creed was blunt: “I’ve always figured that if we put out a good editorial product, the business end would take care of itself.” His son later put the values plainly, saying his father wanted his papers to “stand up for the underprivileged against powerful but insensitive government.” Under that banner the old partisan fire became something new: professional accountability journalism. A century of growing up, about to pay off.
The Golden Decade (2001–2010)
If you want to know what the Poconos lost, look at what one Stroudsburg newsroom did in a single decade.
In 2000, Pocono Record reporter Matt Birkbeck started pulling a thread: suspicious property transactions, inflated appraisals, something rotten in the housing boom transforming Monroe County as families fled New York for a piece of the mountains. What he found was a machine: developers, appraisers, and mortgage brokers working together to trap low-income, elderly, and minority buyers in houses worth far less than they’d paid, on loans they could never afford. Over 6,000 families caught in it. In 2001 the Record published his series, “A Price Too High.” More than 100 defrauded homeowners called the newsroom. Investigations opened, indictments followed, and in 2004 Congress came to East Stroudsburg University for a field hearing where victims testified to lawmakers. Birkbeck won the national Investigative Reporters and Editors award, the profession’s top prize, for a paper with a circulation under 100,000. The developers sued him and the paper for defamation. Neither blinked.
And the newsroom wasn’t done. When Louis DeNaples, one of the most powerful and connected businessmen in northeastern Pennsylvania, sought a casino license for Mount Airy, the Record’s reporters went digging into ground most outlets wouldn’t touch. For decades, whispers had followed the DeNaples name: alleged ties to the Bufalino crime family, the old Scranton mob. Whether or not those whispers were ever proven, everyone in the region knew what was being said, and knew what it might mean to put it in print. The paper covered it anyway, documenting the reputed connections and the statements DeNaples made under oath to gaming regulators. In 2008 he was charged with four counts of perjury and stripped of operational control of his own casino.
The awards told the same story of a newsroom at full strength. In 2010 the Pocono Record won eleven Keystone Press Awards, five of them first place, and took its division’s Sweepstakes for overall excellence. A small-county newsroom took on predatory lenders and the region’s most powerful man, triggered congressional hearings and criminal charges, and swept the state press awards. That was the peak. It took 130 years to build. It took six to destroy.
The Strip Mining (2013–2019)
The Pocono Record was not a dying paper when they came for it. It was fresh off the best decade in its history. It didn’t matter.
Ottaway had been folded into Dow Jones, Dow Jones into News Corp, and in 2013 News Corp sold its local papers, the Record among them, to an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group for $87 million. The CEO’s parting words belong on a headstone for American local news: the papers were “not strategically consistent with the emerging portfolio.” Schoch’s fifty-nine years. Hughes’s world record. Birkbeck’s year on the housing fraud. Not consistent with the portfolio.
The papers passed to GateHouse Media, which filed Chapter 11 that same year. In 2019 GateHouse merged with Gannett into the largest newspaper chain in America, one that would shed nearly half its workforce in about three years. On September 28, 2019, the Wayne Independent, born in that 1878 all-nighter and 141 years old, published its final issue, folded together with three neighboring papers. By 2022 the Pocono Record and what remained of the Wayne County papers shared a single merged staff. Two counties, one skeleton crew, the Honesdale and Stroudsburg editor jobs collapsed into one.
Here’s the part that should make you angry: it happened at the exact moment the internet had made local journalism cheaper to produce and easier to distribute than ever. No presses to buy, no trucks to fuel, no paper to ship. The tools had arrived that could have let a lean newsroom do more with less than ever before. Private equity looked at those tools and used them to calculate how much could be extracted on the way down. They didn’t kill a dying industry. They killed a living one at its peak and sold the parts.
The Hollow Men
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the news business. Into the crater came a wave of sites promising to fill the gap: “reporter” pages and county news feeds that scrape meeting notices, repost press releases, and call it coverage.
They have the vocabulary of watchdog journalism: accountability, transparency, unbiased. What they lack is anything underneath it. No original investigations. No records pulled, no filings read, no questions asked that anyone in power would rather go unasked. No story that ever cost the outlet a thing, because they never publish anything worth the cost. They point at the corporate papers’ failure, correctly, and offer in its place a mission statement stapled to an aggregation feed.
Understand the real measure, because it isn’t a name. Some of the bravest work in the history of the American press was unsigned or pseudonymous. Thomas Paine wrote “Common Sense” anonymously; the Federalist Papers were signed “Publius.” A pen name has always been a legitimate tool of the free press. What matters is whether there’s a real person behind it taking a real risk. When you take on a courthouse, a county government, or the people who run them, the risk finds you.
That’s the line these outfits never cross. Their silence isn’t caution. It’s emptiness. A real story is a bet: this is true, and someone powerful would prefer you never read it. The aggregators make no bet; they risk nothing because they say nothing. The old papers, even at their most partisan and blind, were the opposite. Signed or pseudonymous, they picked fights. That’s the difference between a press worth having and no press at all.
The Press Runs Again
Which brings us home.
In 1878, citizens who needed a voice against local power stayed up all night and printed 3,000 copies of a paper that didn’t exist the day before. They didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t have a business model. They had a mission, so they got the community’s support, and a press.
In 2026, in the same county, facing the same problem of power without scrutiny and decisions without witnesses, the answer is a website instead of a hand press. Pocono Review was built in that 1878 tradition: scrappy, independent, answerable to no party and no portfolio. It works in the tradition of the golden decade: public records, court filings, financial disclosures, stories powerful people would prefer unwritten. And it carries something no Pocono newsroom before it ever had: the full leverage of the modern internet, where the tools that once required forty salaried professionals now fit in the hands of a few people who refuse to look away.
The old-timers would recognize it instantly. Not the technology. The posture. A small operation in hostile country, surrounded by silence, printing anyway. Schoch pulled the same lever for fifty-three years and called one congressional win the glory of his life. The Wayne Independent crew worked until dawn to fight a courthouse tax. The Record’s newsroom stared down the most powerful man in the region, and the reputation that surrounded him.
The method of distribution may have changed, but the need for local accountability journalism has never been greater. The Poconos has a long lineage of fearless, dedicated journalists, though you couldn’t tell it from the majority of the region’s journalistic landscape today. That is, until Pocono Review showed up.
— Pocono Review