Sheep in the 'hood

By Micah Drew, Jordan Hansen and Keila Szpaller

“We thank Anaconda for the last 55 years we’ve been in business. This community has been very good to our family.” — Van Neitz, owner of Leader Printing & Supply. The Anaconda Leader closed, and its last edition was June 5.

It’s a sad day when we hear of another news outlet shutting its doors, especially a local staple like the Anaconda Leader.

I think many journalists who have been around for a while can recall the closure of a nearby paper — if not their own — or at least a big shift in how that paper operates.

For myself, I’ve seen three big shifts to papers I’ve been privileged to work at.

The first was the Missoula Independent, where I interned during my final semester and summer of journalism school. I can still picture the graduate stats class I was sitting in when I saw a Tweet from a former colleague that they’d arrived at the office to find it locked with a notice on the door saying the paper was closed.

My very first job in journalism was with my hometown’s alt-weekly — the Boise Weekly — which my family were loyal readers of as long as I can remember. While I was in grad school I went back to the Weekly as a freelancer, but it had just been sold to Adams Publishing Group, a large newspaper company that owned one of Boise’s daily papers (APG also owns the Bozeman Chronicle.) The paper’s staff soon shrank, the paper itself also got markedly thinner, and its iconic downtown newsroom is now a brewery taproom.

And I can picture the beer — poured from the newsroom keg — I was drinking while watching the St. Patty’s Day Parade march through downtown Kalispell when the editor of the Flathead Beacon told the staff that we were ending our print editions and would be pivoting to entirely online operations for our regular news coverage (the Beacon did, and still does, produce a quarterly lifestyle magazine as well as additional niche print publications). While this change did not affect the phenomenal journalism being done by the Beacon’s reporters, there is nonetheless something lost without the tangible newsprint to pick up each week.

All this to say, thank you, dear reader, for, well, reading! Supporting local news begins by reading local news, and, honestly, you can never read too much!

~ Micah Drew

In my old neighborhood, I used to see some neighbors walk their cats on leashes down the sidewalk.

In my new ‘hood the other day, I saw out of the living room window someone walking sheep down the street. When I came across them outside a few days later, I asked to take a picture.

Karly Kerscher obliged. Kerscher, with the Missoula chapter of Future Farmers of America, is raising Kirk to show at the Missoula fair in August, and this is Kirk with Fern, a “buddy lamb.”

Apparently, sheep are a little like us and need friends.

Kerscher is in 4-H, but she joined FFA because she wanted to deepen her leadership experience and have more opportunities for competition.

The Missoula Fairgrounds posted this reel about Kerscher, and you can see a horse give a chicken a little nudge there.

Got a neighbor taking an unusual creature for a walk? Send it over: [email protected].

~ Keila Szpaller

What better read between the primary and general election in 2026 than a book about elections in Montana — from 1945 to 2025?

I ordered and received this week the new edition of “Big Sky Politics,” by Jon Bennion. The description by Mountain Press says it outlines 80 years of candidates, campaigns and elections, including campaign finance data for top races.

Mike Dennison, political journalist, has this to say in a blurb:

“Bennion’s update of his insightful recounting of Montana elections is a great resource to track the dramatically shifting political winds in the Treasure State during the past two decades — and, more importantly, to tell us how and why it happened.”

Happy reading.

~ Keila Szpaller

Thanks for reading Treasure State Update. Did you know our weekend digest is also free? Sign up here. And if you enjoyed today’s edition, please forward to a friend. Increasing our readership helps us cover more news.