Among Monessen, Pennsylvania’s oldest residents, you’ll find some who still hold out hope for a steel-industry comeback; the town is long past its glory days of roaring factories building a young nation. So far, no luck.
Print journalism’s demise seems largely exaggerated, judging from the western Pennsylvania town, roughly an hour’s drive south of Pittsburgh. Just months after the long-time local paper shuttered in 2015, a new iteration, under new ownership, arose, and this year The Mon Valley Independent celebrated a decade in circulation.
To be clear, the process was far from simple. Formerly known as The Valley Independent, the news brand dates back to the turn of the 20th century and ran for more than 113 years before the last ownership group, Trib Total Media, relinquished its smaller daily papers across the greater Pittsburgh metro, in order to focus on its flagship brand and hyperlocal digital titles around the region…