JOURNAL STAFF

Yakima Valley Newspaper Publisher Mike Lindsey has been named Director for Region 9 of the National Newspaper Association, which covers Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. 

He will join the Board at its September meeting in Omaha. 

Lindsey was raised in a newspaper family. 

He started work at the age of 10 in his father’s newspaper in Sundance, Wyoming. 

He worked there as a “printer’s devil,” learning the California type case, pouring pigs, running a flatbed press and operating a linotype.  

He also sold advertising and did news and photography. He worked here through high school.

Following duty in the U.S. Navy, Lindsey attended South Dakota State University and earned a degree in journalism-printing. 

After graduation he worked in an advertising and public relations firm in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Mike and his wife, Pat, owned their first newspaper in Gillette, Wyoming in 1968. 

He converted the hot type plant to offset, one of the first to do so in Wyoming.  

The couple sold in 1970 and Mike became a publisher for Buckner News Alliance, headquartered in Seattle.

He published a California daily and shopper from 1970-73 and then was transferred to Lewistown, Penn., to publish a 13,000 daily from 1973-77. 

He and Pat returned to Wyoming in late 1977 to purchase the twice-weekly in Torrington. 

From then until 1987 the Lindseys purchased a daily, weekly and shopper in Missouri, a farm weekly and large commercial printing plant in Nebraska, and six other Wyoming newspapers. 

They established a central printing plant in Torrington for Wyoming and Nebraska papers. They also operated a military publication and owned weeklies in Idaho, Arizona and Alaska.

The company was sold in 1987 and in 1988 Mike purchased Media Consultants, Inc. a newspaper brokerage firm, and in 1986 he purchased Beckerman and Associates, a brokerage firm specializing in free paper sales. 

He brokered over 100 transactions prior to purchasing a small newspaper group in Washington in 2006.

Today the couple publishes a weekly and shopper in Toppenish, a weekly Spanish-language paper (the oldest in the state) a monthly business journal, a 60,000-circulation annual visitor guide and a weekly shopper in Yakima.

Lindsey is past president of the Wyoming Press Association, and past president of two SPJ-SDX chapters, and received the “Freedom of Information” award from the Wyoming chapter for winning a Supreme Court case regarding printing public salaries. 

He also received an “Excellence in Journalism” award for outstanding contributions to journalism education at the University of Wyoming, and had an award named in his honor for service to student publications at the University of Wyoming. 

He was recognized in 1999 by South Dakota State College Department of Journalism and Mass Communications as an Outstanding Alumni for journalism service to the nation.

He first joined NNA in 1968, chaired two NNA committees and earned 15 NNA Better Newspaper Contest Awards. He has also served on numerous civic and community boards and organizations.

Lindsey belonged to various service and civic groups serving as president of YMCA, Red Cross, president of an economic development committee and was a member of several Rotary clubs and Elks clubs.

He served the Republican party in Wyoming as a county treasurer, three terms as county chairman, was elected Wyoming State Vice Chairman and was a delegate to the 1984 Republican Convention in Dallas, Texas. 

He also was a member of then governor Ronald Reagan’s re-election committee in California.He is an avid fly fisherman having fished in Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Alaska, Canada, Labrador, New Brunswick, and all across the United States and Hawaii.

His email address is mike@yvnewspapers.com and the web site is www.yvnewspapers.com.