SCOBEY, Mont. — Smoke has turned the rising sun red as it creeps up behind the endless rows of planted fields, and the short-lived morning breeze is ready to give way to another late-July day of nearly triple-digit temperatures when Burl Bowler’s alarm goes off.
That 5 a.m. bell is a backup. Most mornings, Bowler is up a half-hour beforehand, the result of decades of fitful sleep over deadlines and how to craft the perfect front page for the Daniels County Leader, the newspaper his family owned for more than a century.
The early wake-up is the opening act to a routine Bowler has honed with near monk-like devotion, even as the realities of the newspaper industry have forced the details to shift.
His first order of business on Wednesday mornings is updating the website with the latest weekly edition. Bowler wants the 100 or so digital subscribers to get their news at the same time print customers can grab their print copy from the local post office.
Then it’s coffee — a quadruple espresso topped with drip — and a slice of egg-and-sausage breakfast pizza from the main street shop. He scarfs both while driving 55 miles to collect the newspapers from the courier drop-off.
At one time, Bowler printed those papers himself on presses in the back of the Leader newsroom. Now, the copies journey for almost two days from Helena before landing in the back of his pickup truck and, eventually, on the kitchen tables of Daniels County residents.
But this pilgrimage the morning of July 29 is unlike the others for Bowler, whose tenure at the paper started as a kindergartner hired by his dad to sweep floors and ended with a 30-year run as editor and owner. It is the final time the 71-year-old newspaperman will deliver the news of the week to the community he’s called home his entire life.
“There was never an ‘aha’ moment,” Bowler says. “This is all I know. I was raised in it.”
Bowler and his wife, Roz, announced in June they’d decided to fold the Leader after failing to find a suitable buyer. They had grown exhausted, and their bodies were no longer holding up to the long hours and manual labor of newspapering.
They also felt the pull toward spending more time with family, especially 10 grandkids they wanted to see outside the rigid schedule of weekly production.
The final issue would run the last week of July, a bookend not only for the paper of record in this northeastern Montana town but also a business sustained by three generations of Bowlers.
“I would love to tell you I’m over it,” Bowler said, teary-eyed from the driver’s seat. “But I’m not.”
Bowler’s grandfather bought the paper in 1924, two years after the original owner started it. The Leader was his final stop after a colorful career spent bouncing between frontier papers in places like Antelope, Plentywood and Flaxville.
Bowler’s father, Larry, took over in 1955. A World War II Marine Corps veteran, he brought that regimented leadership style to the newsroom, a change from the more laid-back approach of Bowler’s grandpa.
Though he entertained dreams of becoming an attorney, Bowler, the youngest of six kids, chose the “University of the Daniels County Leader” instead. He worked alongside Larry until he and Roz took over about 30 years ago. They weathered economic downturns, the upheaval of the news media industry and a number of calamities, including a 2006 fire that razed the old newsroom and destroyed its presses.
Pride in the family legacy is part of what fed Bowler’s resilience. It’s also what made it so hard to step away. Even as he made that final drive from Wolf Point with the last batch of papers, Bowler reflected on what his late father might think about his decision to call it quits.
“I’m pretty sure my dad would understand,” Bowler said, his eyes growing glassy. “I am pretty sure I fulfilled the family obligation.”
A community mourning the loss of its local paper might feel quaint, even more so in a time when “fake news” has become part of the cultural lexicon and touch screens have supplanted the grainy feel of newspaper pages.
But that’s exactly what unfolded in Scobey over the last month as residents reckoned with what they would do without the Leader. Businesses took out full-page ads in the final issue thanking the Leader for its contribution to Daniels County. A steady stream of longtime readers walked through the newsroom door on the final print day, forking over more cash than needed to buy the paper, which one person called the “collector’s edition” of the Leader.
More than two newspapers closed every week in 2025, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. Unlike years past, most of the closures came at smaller, independent outlets rather than large chains, “signaling that an increasing number of longtime family publishers are surrendering to economic pressures.”
Scobey is the kind of place that doesn’t see much daylight in mainstream media. It’s a stone’s throw from Canada and roughly two hours from North Dakota, tucked into a pocket of Montana far out of reach from legacy outlets and even the state’s cable television stations.
Many of the 1,600 people in Daniels County rely on farming and ranching to make a living, and a larger-than-average share of residents are above the age of 65. For years, it was the most rural county in the Lower 48 yet once had three newspapers covering it.
Rep. Valerie Moore, a Republican from Plentywood whose district includes Daniels County, said local papers like the Leader are the best avenue she has for speaking directly to constituents.
“It is undoubtedly the heartbeat and the connection of the community,” she said. “It’s how I can make them feel like they are a part of what I am doing.”
Bowler doesn’t begrudge his four kids for not wanting to take on the business that he likens to a milk cow because “you always have to be there.”
He and Roz put out feelers for months looking for the right buyer. It didn’t have to mean a big payday. Bowler was more focused on finding someone with some “skin in the game” who would steward the Leader into the next chapter.
“I wasn’t going to give away my family legacy to just anybody,” he said.
That person never came. In fact, hardly anyone expressed interest, Bowler said.
Daniels County coverage will be taken up by the Northern Plains Independent out of Wolf Point, another family-owned paper run by a third-generation newspaper devotee. The Independent hired an additional reporter to pick up Scobey-area coverage, and transferred subscriptions from about 700 Leader customers.
Bowler’s final deadline as editor of the Daniels County Leader was perhaps the hardest. He put pen to paper on what would become his last column eight weeks ahead of time, but even that didn’t feel like enough.
“I was crying most of the time,” he said. “I would reread it and the waterworks would start, and then I’d have to rewrite it.”
As people stopped by the newsroom to purchase their final paper, they’d thank Bowler.
In turn, he or Roz would hand them their last copy of the Leader, which was really a tribute to them, the people who had made the work possible all these years.
“There is an old saying that a newspaper is the rough first draft of history. For 104 years, the Daniels County Leader has had the privilege of recording the history of Daniels County one week at a time,” Bowler wrote. “Those pages don’t belong to us. They belong to every family whose milestones, accomplishments, celebrations, challenges and memories have filled their pages over the years.”
