Three Forks Voice
The Three Forks Voice is a weekly newspaper serving Three Forks, Montana, in Gallatin County, and the surrounding headwaters country where the Gallatin, Madison and Jefferson rivers meet to form the Missouri River. Launched in October 2018, it is one of Montana's newest community weeklies — founded in an era when the national story was of newspapers closing, not opening — and it has built its reputation on intensive coverage of the Three Forks City Council, Three Forks Schools and the Wolves athletic teams, Gallatin County affairs and the community life of a fast-growing town at the crossroads of Interstate 90 and U.S. Route 287.
The Voice is owned and published locally. Its publisher is Melissa Jenkins, co-owner of the paper, an advertising and accounting specialist who also works as a photographer, reporter and graphic designer for the publication. Its most prolific byline is Jack H. Smith, whose news reporting and weekly opinion column anchor the paper. The Voice publishes in print each week and continuously online at threeforksvoice.com, where its stories are organised by news, sports, opinion, community and business.
A new paper in October 2018
The Voice dates its own beginning precisely. In a May 2024 editorial congratulating the Three Forks High School Class of 2024, the paper recalled that when it first started the newspaper in October 2018, those graduates were only seventh graders — and that it had followed them ever since through classrooms, sports and activities to graduation. That single paragraph captures the founding idea: a paper started from scratch to watch a community grow up, in a town that had deep newspaper roots but needed a fresh local voice.
Three Forks was not new to journalism. The Three Forks Herald was established in a tent the same week the town was founded in September 1908 and, by local tradition, never missed an issue; the Three Forks News published from 1911, and the Herald lineage continued in various combined forms for decades. The Voice is not a continuation of the Herald, but it consciously works in that tradition — a weekly created for Three Forks alone, in a market otherwise served from Bozeman, the county seat thirty miles east, whose much larger daily could never give a town of under 2,000 people this level of attention.
The headwaters town
Three Forks takes its name from the three forks of the Missouri, where Lewis and Clark arrived on July 28, 1805, and named the rivers for President Jefferson and cabinet members Gallatin and Madison. Sacagawea, who had been captured by Hidatsa raiders near this spot as a girl, returned with the expedition as its guide. The modern town, founded in 1908 as a Milwaukee Road railroad point, sits near Missouri Headwaters State Park, where the three rivers join, and downstream from Lewis and Clark Caverns country. Mayor-council government runs the city, with six elected council members; Randy Johnston became mayor in 2022 and was unopposed in 2025.
Growth is the town's defining modern story. As Bozeman and the Gallatin Valley have boomed, Three Forks — at the junction of I-90 and U.S. 287, with Three Forks Airport a mile southeast — has grown with it, adding subdivisions such as Rolling Glen and putting pressure on schools, law enforcement and infrastructure. That growth, and the arguments it causes over capital improvement plans, water, roads and emergency services, gives the Voice a news agenda far livelier than its town's size suggests.
City hall, county and schools: the reporting core
The Voice's news pages are built on meetings. It reports Three Forks City Council sessions in working detail — for example, the council's June 2024 deliberations over the updated Capital Improvements Plan prepared with Great West Engineering, a document that ranks infrastructure projects and funding sources and effectively decides what the growing town builds next. It covers the Three Forks School District's decisions, from early learning programmes and screening dates to school levies on the May ballot, and Gallatin County business that lands locally, from open burning permits and fire department advice in Willow Creek to commissioners urging voters to approve a decennial local government study in 2024.
State and national news enters strictly through the local door. When Montana's U.S. Senator Tim Sheehy, a former aerial firefighter, passed his Fire Ready Nation Act through the Senate in September 2025, the Voice reported it as wildfire policy for a readership that lives with smoke every summer. When the state celebrated acquiring a 26-acre parcel at Missouri Headwaters State Park in October 2024, with Governor Greg Gianforte attending, the Voice covered it as a hometown park story — because it was one.
Wolves sports: the Voice's beating heart
If meetings are the paper's skeleton, Wolves sports are its heartbeat. The Voice has covered Three Forks High School athletics since its first autumn, when it reported exactly one football game in its partial first season. By the summer of 2019 it was sitting in on new head football coach Connor Sullivan's first meeting with his players, and it followed the programme for years afterward, editorialising in November 2025 that the Wolves' football team was making the whole community proud. Its sports pages range from divisional basketball tournaments — the Wolves battling Lodge Grass in the Southern B divisional championship in March 2026 — to the Three Forks powerlifting club, which went from sixteen state records in its first state meet in 2024 to a team state championship in East Helena in March 2025, with all eight competitors on the podium.
This is coverage no regional daily replicates: not just scores, but the texture — which coach said what, which freshman stepped up, how a programme was built over six years. For families in Three Forks, the Voice is the scrapbook of record for their children's school careers, a role the paper embraced from the day it told the Class of 2024 it had been watching since seventh grade.
Community life and the generosity beat
The Voice devotes long features to the voluntary fabric of the area. It covered the Headwaters Trail System's $60,000 Recreational Trails Program grant in 2020 for the Jefferson Loop Trail connecting the town's east and west trails; the Three Forks Farmers Market's Thursday evenings at John Q. Adams Milwaukee Railroad Park; the twentieth anniversary of Three Forks Market in 2025, whose owners turned a dream grocery into a two-decade institution; and fundraisers such as the February 2026 baked goods auction for the new FFA Alumni organisation, which raised $11,993 during a home basketball night.
It also keeps the community's solemn memories. Broadwater County Deputy Mason Moore was killed in the line of duty near Three Forks on May 16, 2017; his widow Jodi founded the Mason Moore Foundation that November. The Voice has followed the foundation's growth — $251,879 in grants to law enforcement agencies, including $53,085 to thirteen agencies in 2025 — and its annual Love Wins Bash fundraiser, treating the story as what it is: a central thread in the town's modern identity.
The column and the people behind the paper
Jack H. Smith's weekly column gives the Voice its personality: part memoir, part humour, part community notebook, recalling everything from driving across Montana with a gas pump nozzle dangling from his car to family visits from Arizona. In September 2025 he used the column to praise co-owner and publisher Melissa Jenkins, recounting how the two of them had uprooted their family and their lives in Wyoming to purchase a newspaper — the leap that stands behind the Voice's existence. Jenkins herself is the paper's other half: owner, publisher, advertising and accounting lead, photographer, reporter and designer, a one-person business department typical of family weeklies at their best.
That two-person engine, supplemented by community contributors and syndicated Montana reporting from partners such as Montana Free Press, produces a full weekly paper and a busy website. It is the classic American family newspaper model, rebuilt in 2018 by two people who moved states to make it happen.
Three Forks Voice and its neighbours
The Voice circulates in a distinctive media neighbourhood. Willow Creek, a few miles south, graduates classes counted in single digits — two graduates in May 2021, each photographed for the paper. Cardwell, Manhattan, Logan and the Clarkston route of the school district all fall within its orbit, as do the Jefferson and Gallatin river access sites whose flood maps, fishing closures and fire seasons it reports. It shares the broader headwaters audience with the Whitehall Ledger to the west and the Bozeman Daily Chronicle to the east, but its franchise is unmistakably the Three Forks school district and city limits.
The Voice today
Eight years after its October 2018 launch, the Three Forks Voice has become the established weekly of record for Three Forks, listed in references on the town alongside a media history stretching back to a tent in 1908. It survived the pandemic years that closed older papers, chronicled a state championship powerlifting team and a proud football programme, and kept showing up at council meetings while the town planned its growth. Its website archive, thousands of stories deep, now constitutes the most complete public record of twenty-first-century Three Forks.
The Voice's existence is itself an argument: that the economics of local news, while hard, are not hopeless when a paper is owned by people who live in the town, cover everything themselves and understand that following a class from seventh grade to graduation is not nostalgia — it is the entire business model of trust. Three Forks gambled on growth; the Voice gambled on Three Forks. Both bets are still paying off.
