Hugoton Hermes
The Hugoton Hermes is a weekly newspaper serving Hugoton and Stevens County in far southwestern Kansas. It is the official newspaper of Stevens County and, for most of its modern history, the only newspaper published in the county. From a town of about 3,700 people — the county seat, set in the High Plains near the Oklahoma border — the Hermes covers city and county government, schools, agriculture, the natural gas industry, and the everyday milestones of a community where the paper and its readers have known each other for generations.
Established in 1887, the Hermes is among the older continuously published weeklies in western Kansas. Its website is hugotonhermes.com, and Kansas newspaper listings have in recent years shown it as a Thursday paper with a circulation in the range of 1,600, after earlier industry reports put its paid circulation at about 2,200. Those numbers, in a county of about 5,250 people in the 2020 census, represent a deep household reach.
Established in 1887, a Year After Hugoton
Hugoton itself was settled in 1885 by families from McPherson, who first called the place Hugo, for the French writer Victor Hugo, and then changed the name to Hugoton to avoid confusion with Hugo, Colorado. The first post office opened in April 1886, and Stevens County was re-established the same year. The Hermes followed in 1887, making it a product of the town's first organizing years.
Early issues show a classic frontier weekly. A 1907 edition identified T. W. Hubbard as editor and publisher, listed a subscription price of one dollar a year, and was published every Friday at that time. Church and society notices were carried free in part, display and local advertising were sold by the column inch and line, and the front page mixed local announcements with arguments about railroads, county development, and the future of southwestern Kansas. The paper's name — Hermes, the messenger of Greek myth — was a common nineteenth-century choice for a newspaper that promised to carry news quickly to an isolated settlement.
A County Seat Town and a Violent Beginning
The Hermes was founded in the middle of one of Kansas's most notorious county-seat wars. When Stevens County was organized, Governor John Martin designated Hugoton as the interim county seat. The rival town of Woodsdale contested that status, and the conflict escalated into arrests, kidnappings, and killings, culminating in the Hay Meadow Massacre in July 1888, in which the Woodsdale sheriff and three of his men were murdered. Hugoton became the permanent county seat in 1887, but tensions continued for years afterward; Woodsdale's founder was assassinated outside the Hugoton courthouse in 1891.
A local newspaper in such a setting was never a neutral bystander in the eyes of its readers. It reported court proceedings, land and town-lot disputes, and the arguments of the competing factions, and its own survival depended on which town survived. Woodsdale is now only a memory. Hugoton, and the Hermes with it, endured.
From Dust Bowl to the Hugoton Gas Field
During the 1890s, hard times drove many Stevens County settlers away toward newly opened lands in the Southwest, and the county's population fell sharply. The arrival of the Santa Fe Railway in 1913 revived Hugoton, and a far larger transformation came in 1927, when natural gas was discovered southwest of the city. Development of the Hugoton Natural Gas Area turned the town into a center of gas extraction. The Hugoton field became the largest natural gas field in North America and one of the largest in the world.
The Hermes chronicled that transformation and its costs. The 1930s brought the Dust Bowl to Stevens County, compounding the Great Depression in a region dependent on dryland farming. In later decades, irrigated corn, wheat, sorghum, and alfalfa, together with cattle feeding and gas production, reshaped the county economy. For the Hermes, the news agenda became a distinctive southwestern Kansas mix: crop and irrigation reports, school news, courthouse business, and the fortunes of an energy field whose name the town itself carries around the world.
The Goering Years, 1979 to 2007
Don and Sherill Goering owned the Hermes from 1979 until 2007, a tenure of nearly three decades that gave the paper unusual stability for a small weekly. Industry reporting at the time of their sale described the Hermes as a 2,200 paid-circulation weekly and the only newspaper in Stevens County. Long ownership matters in a town of this size: the Goerings' Hermes recorded an entire generation's school years, marriages, business openings, and public careers.
During those years the paper also maintained the features readers in Stevens County have long expected, including its historical retrospectives. Its "Looking Back" columns, drawn from earlier Hermes files, regularly republish items from decades past, and material from its August 1961 centennial edition is still quoted in the paper today. That habit — treating its own archive as a community resource — is a hallmark of the Hermes style.
Sold to Its Own Employees in 2007
In May 2007, the Goerings sold the Hermes to three longtime employees — RoGlenda Coulter, Kay McDanials, and Ruthie Winget — who organized as Faith Publishing LLC. The sale was brokered by Rickenbacher Media of Dallas. Employee buyouts of this kind are rare in modern newspaper economics, and the Hugoton transaction drew national trade-press attention precisely because the buyers were not a chain or an outside investor, but the people who already produced the paper.
Coulter, a lifelong Hugoton resident, has explained in later interviews that she and one of her partners had read the Hermes as children and did not want to see it disappear. The new owners took on the familiar difficulties of a rural weekly — tight finances, small staff, and the challenge of covering everything with few hands — because the alternative, a county with no newspaper at all, was worse.
An Oasis in a News Desert
The Hermes gained renewed national attention in 2024, when public-radio reporting on the shrinking American local-news landscape featured it as an example of a paper still holding on. That reporting noted that more than 2,900 weekly newspapers in the United States had closed over two decades, and that more than half of Kansas counties had only one newspaper or none. A printing press in nearby Liberal, about 30 miles away, was described as helping papers like the Hermes keep printing.
In that coverage, Kansas Press Association executive director Emily Bradbury pointed to the concrete civic work the Hermes does: attending city council meetings, tracking how tax dollars are raised and spent, and informing residents about those decisions. Coulter pointed to the other end of the scale — results and triumphs in local middle-school sports that no outside outlet would travel to Stevens County to record. Together, those two examples describe the Hermes's range, from accountability reporting to celebration, better than any mission statement.
What the Hermes Covers
Week to week, the Hermes covers Hugoton city government, the Stevens County Commission, courts and legal notices as the county's official newspaper, and the Hugoton schools, including the Eagles' high school and middle-school teams. It reports on Moscow, the county's other incorporated community, and on farm and ranch life across a 727-square-mile county of flat, open prairie.
Regular content includes obituaries and family news, church and social items, school honor rolls and activities, extension and conservation news, and public-notice advertising required by Kansas law. Its historical features are unusually prominent: full columns are devoted to reprinting and reflecting on items from the Hermes of ten, twenty, fifty, and more years ago, so that a single issue often contains both the county's present business and its remembered past side by side.
Hugoton Today
Hugoton in the 2020 census had 3,747 residents, and Stevens County had 5,250. The city sits at the junction of U.S. Route 56 and state highways K-25 and K-51, at an elevation of just over 3,100 feet, about 11 miles southeast of the Cimarron River. Its landmarks include the Stevens County Gas and Historical Museum, dedicated in 1961 to preserve the story of the gas field and the county's pioneers, and a historic 1886–87 dwelling preserved in the museum complex.
For a community of that scale, the loss of a newspaper would not be an abstraction. It would mean no regular printed record of commission votes, school board actions, court notices, prep sports, or obituaries gathered in one place. The Hermes's owners have spoken openly about that stakes-raising reality, and it helps explain both the employee buyout of 2007 and the paper's continued operation long after many comparable weeklies have closed.
Format and Audience
The Hermes is a paid-circulation weekly. Kansas listings have shown a Thursday publication day in recent compilations, with circulation of about 1,600, down from the roughly 2,200 reported at the 2007 sale — a decline that mirrors Stevens County's own slow population change and the national pattern for print weeklies, while still leaving the paper in a majority of local households. It publishes in print and maintains its website for subscriptions, news submission, and reader contact.
Its audience is intensely local, with an additional readership of former residents who keep subscriptions from elsewhere in Kansas and beyond. For that diaspora, the Hermes functions as a letter from home: proof that Hugoton's schools, churches, teams, and courthouse are still carrying on, reported by people who stayed.
Legacy
Founded a year after its county was organized, raised through a county-seat war, the Dust Bowl, a world-scale gas boom, and the collapse of the traditional weekly-newspaper business model, the Hugoton Hermes has outlasted almost every institution founded alongside it except the county government it covers. Its centennial edition in 1961 is still cited in its own pages; its archive, held in part by the Stevens County Library and in national newspaper databases, preserves runs from the 1880s onward for researchers.
Today the Hermes remains what it was in 1887: Stevens County's messenger — the official, weekly, printed account of how Hugoton and Moscow govern themselves, educate their children, work their land and gas fields, and remember their dead. In a state where many counties have lost that account entirely, its continuation is itself news.
