Hungry Horse News at 80: Kennedy kept the tradition of excellence for 20 years

In September of 1978 Mel Ruder sold the Hungry Horse News to Sage Publishing, a partnership of Wyoming newspapers and editors. Brian Kennedy, 23, was named manager and editor of the newspaper. He had a journalism degree from the University of Wyoming and had been a reporter at the Sheridan Press in Wyoming.

His father, Bruce M. Kennedy, was well-known as a newspaper publisher in Wyoming.

Kennedy immediately made changes to the look of the newspaper, modernizing the layout.

Ruder gave him his blessing.

“The paper is more attractive. It’s a new ball game...” he said, adding he regretted he didn’t do some of the changes himself.

The paper had a paid circulation of 8,500 at the time.

Greg Sorenson, a longtime printer under Ruder, recalled one of the first tasks at hand, and part of the sale, was that Sage would put in an offset press at the Hungry Horse News.

The press was installed in November of 1978 and the first issue, which had spot-color blue letters on the front page, was printed Nov. 23, 1978. Sorenson recalled in a recent interview that the press gears failed in one of the units almost immediately and had to be replaced.

Still, Sorenson and Ron Miller and Doug Dougherty worked tirelessly to get the press and its three units up and running within the week, so an edition would not be missed. Prior to that, the printing had been done in Kalispell at the Daily Inter Lake for several years.

Now the Hungry Horse News would print not only its own newspaper in-house, but several others across Montana, including the Whitefish Pilot.

The Hungry Horse News was a bustling place and the goal was to bring quality and factual news to its readers.

Kennedy hired Jackie Adams right of the gate to help write stories.

It was one of the best hires he made, noted longtime office manager Dorothy Downen, as Adams had previously owned the Whitefish Pilot and knew how to run a weekly newspaper.

Scott Crandell joined the staff in January of 1979 and was the longest tenured reporter under Kennedy, working at the newspaper until 1986.

Crandell was young as well, just 22.

“We were kids,” he recalled in a recent interview. “The newspaper was respected and people would talk to you, as opposed to the shut out of news today.”

He recalled that if Glacier Park had a fatal accident or other issue, the Park Service would call the newspaper and alert the staff, as opposed to getting a press release five days after an incident, which it has been doing lately.

“Back then if there was a bear mauling, the park wouldn’t cover it up for a week,” he said.

In the early days,  they wrote stories on electric typewriters, hand edited the copy and then it went to the linotype for typesetting. Galleys (long strips of text) were pasted on pages and the whole page was photographed with a large camera. The negative was then burned into a thin metal plate and put on a press.

Eventually, the process became computerized. Sorenson recalled installing one of the first computers in the office. It was a beast, but it did make life easier.

Crandell recalled a typical assignment was to go out and interview a subject, take the pictures, “soup” the film, make prints if need be and write the story.

He even delivered newspapers, which he said were the best looking newspapers in the state under the expertise of Sorenson, Miller and Dougherty.

“They were the best printers around,” he said.

On days the newspaper was printed, Crandell even delivered papers to grocery stores.

People would be waiting.

“Wow, people care about what I do,” he recalled thinking.

Kennedy and the staff went on to win numerous national and Montana awards and was often named the best weekly newspaper in the state.

The news was never very far away. Crandell recalled his apartment was on Fourth Avenue West, not far from Highway 2.

On Jan. 21, 1984 he recalled numerous emergency vehicles, sirens blaring as they went down the highway. He called dispatch (the city had its own police dispatch at the time) and they told him a Whitefish school bus coming back home collided head-on with the pup trailer of a jackknifed fuel-tanker in the eastbound lane of an icy Highway 2 near Essex. The collision led to an explosion and a fire.

Nine people were killed.

By the time Crandell arrived, the fire was out, the bodies removed, but the gruesome carnage remained.

He shot rolls and rolls of film. It was one of the worst highway  tragedies in Montana history.

He worked with Kennedy as a team to put the story out, which made national headlines, including the New York Times.

Crandell went on to get a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Montana, worked a couple years after that for the Great Falls Tribune and then many more years as the news editor at the Daily Inter Lake. All told, a journalism career of 40 years.

I had the pleasure of working with him later in his career and he was as fine a newsman as any I have met.

Kennedy hired many more notable journalists over his tenure as owner of the Hungry Horse News, including Michael Jamison, Rob Chaney, Lynnette Hintze, Chery Sabol,  Nancy Kimball and Tom Lutey, just to name a few.

He also ran G. George Ostrom’s column for years. (As did Ruder, though it was an on and off relationship when Ostrom started his own weekly in Kalispell). 

Ostrom, a longtime KOFI and KGEZ radio newsman and commentator wrote humorous columns that were a hit with readers for decades and he was a great source of information for the newspaper.

Chaney and Lutey are still writing news stories today for the Mountain Journal and Montana Free Press respectively.

In addition, Larry Wilson kept North Forkers engaged with his columns for years.

Kennedy and his wife Carol, took complete ownership of the Hungry Horse News a few years after the Sage purchase.

When the newspaper turned 50 in 1996 Kennedy  noted in a column that it was an awful lot of work and the most enjoyable aspect was the appreciation of its readers.

The same holds true today.

Kennedy sold the newspaper and the Whitefish Pilot, which he also owned, to Lee Enterprises in January of 1999.

The Lee acquisition marked the end of the editor-publisher-owner era of the Hungry Horse News.

The family ownership of the newspaper was restored in June 2002, when the Hagadone family, in a swap with Lee, took ownership of the Hungry Horse News. The Hagadones owned half ownership of a newspaper in Iowa and Lee owned the other half, so the two swapped, with the Hagadones taking ownership of the Hungry Horse News, Whitefish Pilot and several other weeklies in Northwest Montana that Lee held.

It is still owned by the Hagadone Corporation today.

As for the Kennedys, Carol died tragically in a car accident in September 2015 and Brian Kennedy died in a climbing accident on Dusty Star Mountain with fellow climber and friend Jack Beard on July 22, 2022 in Glacier National Park.

Kennedy was an avid climber and spent his retirement years (he retired in his 40s) climbing peaks.

He was 67 when he died in the climbing accident.