Why it matters
Most of what anyone knows about Scottsdale between the war and the Preserve was first written down in the Scottsdale Progress. Its first weekly issue came out on May 6, 1948, three years before the town incorporated, and from 1961 it covered the charter, the Civic Center, the Greenbelt, the annexations and the resort boom as a daily. When this site quotes a council meeting from 1968 or a flood from 1970, the Progress is usually where the quote came from, by way of someone else’s clippings.
Then it vanished. Four chain owners in thirteen years folded the Scottsdale daily into the East Valley Tribune, and when the Tribune’s owner retreated from Scottsdale in 2008 and 2009, the paper that had covered the city for sixty years simply stopped. For nine years a city of a quarter million had no newspaper of its own. The name came back on September 16, 2018, on a free Sunday weekly from Times Media Group in Tempe, the only outlet whose beat is the city rather than the metro. The daily is gone. Its record is on microfilm, and nowhere online.
Where to find it today
The paper. Free on Sundays at more than 700 racks and by home delivery in parts of the city, with a digital edition at scottsdale.org; the office is in Tempe.
The archive. Back issues survive on microfilm and in clipping files, not online; the Scottsdale Public Library’s Scottsdale Heritage Connection, in the Civic Center Library, is the place to start asking.
The Greenbelt. The Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt is the paper’s most visible editorial victory: publisher Jonathan Marshall campaigned for parks and lakes in the wash instead of a concrete flood channel, and the city built the parks.
How it started
The Progress and the town grew up together, and the Chamber was midwife to both. In 1947 the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce incorporated and proclaimed the crossroads “The West’s Most Western Town”; in 1948 James H. Boyd started a weekly to print the news of a place that had, legally, no government to cover. The Scottsdale Historical Society’s timeline gives the founder and the year; the city’s historic context report adds that the paper was “established in 1948” and “by 1961 it changed to daily publication.” Everything else about the first fifteen years, who bankrolled News Publishing Company, who edited, how many copies, is missing from the public record.
What the early paper did is easier to infer than to document. A booster town’s weekly in the late 1940s existed to boost. It printed the Chamber’s campaigns, the Sunshine Festival of 1951, the incorporation petitions, Malcolm White’s council, and the ribbon cuttings of a town of 2,000 that became a town of 10,000 by 1960. It went daily in 1961, the year voters approved the city charter, and a city that had just hired itself a professional manager got a professional watchdog in the same twelve months.
The decisions that locked it in
Marshall, 1963. The decision that gave the Progress its character was the sale in 1963 to Jonathan Marshall and his wife Maxine, who ran it together as publisher and co-publisher. Marshall ran what Wikipedia calls “a liberal editorial viewpoint that argued for open space, open public meetings and open records” in a suburb that voted Goldwater. The Progress opposed the Vietnam War, backed gun control and attacked the Klan, and Marshall was twice nominated for a Pulitzer. The alternative was a quieter owner, or a chain, and the Progress would then have been what most suburban dailies were: a shopper with a sports section.
Open meetings. The paper’s defining fight came after the Scottsdale council awarded a garbage contract at a 1 a.m. session with no public discussion. Marshall drafted an open meetings law, attorney Bruce Babbitt revised it and state senator Sandra Day O’Connor introduced it; it became Arizona Revised Statutes 38-431 and following, and the Progress campaigned next for a public records law. Every Arizona reporter who cites the open meetings law is quoting a Scottsdale garbage contract. The paper’s coverage of Bud Tims’s open-plan City Hall, designed by Bennie Gonzales and opened in October 1968, was of a piece: the mayor wanted government done where the public could see it, and so did the paper.
The Greenbelt. When the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a concrete channel down Indian Bend Wash after the floods of the 1960s and 1970, the Progress championed the citizens’ alternative, a chain of parks, lakes and paths that would flood harmlessly. The city chose the parks. The Greenbelt runs eleven miles, and it figures in every account of Marshall’s career.
Sale to Cowles, 1987. After 24 years the Marshalls sold to Cowles Media Company, the Minneapolis publisher, in May 1987, and used the proceeds to found the Marshall Fund of Arizona. There was no local successor. Cowles held the paper six years and sold it to Cox in 1993, and from then on the Progress belonged to companies for which Scottsdale was one zone in an East Valley cluster.
The merger, 1993. Cox already owned the Mesa Tribune, the Tempe Daily News, the Chandler Arizonan and the Gilbert Tribune. It combined them with the Progress under one newsroom, and the Scottsdale masthead became the Scottsdale Progress Tribune (1993 to 1997) and then the Scottsdale Tribune, an edition of the East Valley Tribune. Cox sold the group to Thomson in 1996; Thomson, leaving newspapers, sold to Freedom Communications in 2000. By then the Scottsdale paper was a zoned edition with a shrinking bureau, competing against the Arizona Republic’s suburban sections. Poynter’s 2009 autopsy put it simply: the Republic “won the metro newspaper war, first in Scottsdale and Tempe.”
The years it nearly ended
It did end. In October 2008 Freedom’s publisher announced that the East Valley Tribune would stop publishing in Scottsdale and Tempe as of 2009. About 140 employees, roughly half the staff, were laid off in January 2009. Freedom filed for Chapter 11 on September 1, 2009, and on November 2 the Tribune announced it would cease operations on December 31. The Tribune was rescued by 10/13 Communications in 2010, but the Scottsdale edition was already gone.
The resurrection came from a different direction. Steve Strickbine’s Times Media Group, which had bought the Scottsdale Airpark News in 2010 and the East Valley Tribune in 2016, relaunched the Scottsdale Progress on September 16, 2018 as a free Sunday weekly: 40,000 printed copies, 700 pickup locations and 50,000 emailed copies. What was given up to come back was the daily, the subscription, the standalone newsroom and the Scottsdale address. What came back was the beat.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The 1948 Progress was a booster town’s weekly, and the 2018 Progress is, in its publisher’s words, a paper whose goal is “to dig down deep into Scottsdale each week.” Between them sits the Marshall daily, an adversarial, campaigning newspaper that treated open government as its mission and the council as its subject. Each phase matches a business model: Main Street advertising, paid daily circulation, regional scale, and now free distribution, where the advertiser is the customer: the 1948 model with better printing.
The Progress today covers City Hall, the school district, obituaries and the Airpark, and runs Joan Fudala’s “Remember When” column, which is more local history than the daily ever printed. The open meetings law it won is still on the books. The paper that would use it to sue the council no longer has the budget.
Who the record leaves out
The Progress is a primary source for this site, so it is worth saying plainly what a booster-era weekly covered and did not. In its first fifteen years the paper’s subjects were the Chamber, the merchants, the resorts, the parade and the new town government, all of which it had a stake in promoting. The Mexican-American families south of the tracks, whose children attended the segregated Coronado School and who built the Old Adobe Mission by hand, appear in the Western-themed town’s paper mostly as color: the Miracle of the Roses pageant, mariachis at the Sunshine Festival. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, a mile east, appears as “Indians in from the reservations” hitching horses downtown, a phrase the city’s own historic report still uses. That is inference from the structure of a booster weekly, since the back issues are not online to check, and it is why this site treats 1950s Progress clippings as the town’s account of itself rather than as the record.
The chain era’s gap is different: as the Scottsdale bureau shrank through the 1990s and 2000s, whole neighborhoods north of Shea had no reporter, and the annexation of the city’s northern half was covered, if at all, from Mesa. The relaunched weekly covers downtown and the Airpark best. North Scottsdale and the south side remain the thinnest parts of the beat, as they were in 1948.
What it didn’t have to become
The Progress did not have to come back. Dozens of suburban dailies died between 2008 and 2018 and stayed dead, and the plausible alternative is the one that actually ran from 2009 to 2018: a city of 250,000 covered by the Republic’s zoned pages, a business monthly in the Airpark, and whatever the TV stations drove up for. The revival happened because one Tempe publisher owned the surviving Tribune and the Airpark News, saw a city with no paper and a lot of real estate advertising, and bet on print.
The older contingency matters more. Had the paper not gone daily in 1961, or had Marshall not bought it in 1963, Scottsdale’s charter decade and Civic Center years would have been covered by the Phoenix papers as a suburb, and Arizona’s open meetings law might have started somewhere other than a Scottsdale garbage contract. A town’s newspaper is usually a consequence of the town. For two decades, under one family, this one was a cause.