Richard Shaw: ‘I still think of myself as a rookie’

By Richard Shaw

When Richard Shaw was named publisher in 2005, he wasn’t sure he could handle the job.
“I was such a rookie in the newspaper business, I wondered if I would ever get through my first year without being fired,” he said in a recent interview. “Despite 20 years of management experience in various kinds of other businesses it was all new, and I had so much to learn.”
He still feels that way.
“Every day is a new day at the Sun Advocate,” he said. “At least once a week I find I confront a problem that I never had before that I need to solve. In fact, there are so many things I don’t know after 10 years in this job that I still think of myself as a rookie.”
He said that after much evaluation this winter in discussions with his wife Sherill, the two of them believed it was time for him to move onto something else, something called retirement.
“They call it retirement because of my age, but I hardly see it that way, other than that I will not have the responsibility of the day-to-day operations at the paper,” he stated. “As I look at the future I am going to be busy with some exciting new projects.”
Shaw, who grew up in Murray, has had a varied life of work experience, so making the change is nothing new to him.
“I have had three different careers in my life and many, many jobs,” he said. “I have been at the Sun Advocate for 15 years, and that is the longest I have stayed anywhere in my work life.”
Although Shaw’s origins are in the Salt Lake Valley, he considers himself a Carbon County native after spending 25 years living in the area.
“It’s interesting as I told people I had made up my mind to leave the paper over the last few weeks,” he said. “About 50 percent of them asked me if I was going to stay in the area. I was actually taken back by that. I wouldn’t want to willingly live anywhere else.”
While his family roots don’t run deep in the area, his cultural roots do. His grandfather on his fathers side was a coal miner in England and later immigrated to the United States where he worked in hard rock mines in Colorado and then later at Lark in Salt Lake County. A large number of his uncles and cousins worked at Kennecott.
“When I got out of high school some in the family thought I would go to work up on the hill like a lot of my cousins,” he said. “But instead I wanted to do other things, but I wasn’t sure what. I went to the University of Utah and majored in audiology, but never went on to get a master’s degree, which you needed to work in the field.”
Shaw said that he worked his way through college as a maintenance man at a mobile home park and then a custodian for Granite School District. Eventually he ended up being a facilities manager with the school district. It was during that time he started to really write seriously. He had his first magazine article published in 1984 and that set him on a new path. He eventually ended up as an editor for a business magazine in California and lived in Orange County for awhile. But he was never happy living amongst the millions of people on the coast.
“I was raised on a dairy farm and missed the country as well as the open unoccupied spaces of the mountain west,” he said.
So he moved back to Utah and took various jobs in the facilities business finally ending up as the assistant physical plant director at the College of Eastern Utah.
“I was only there for four years, but I loved working at the college,” he said. “I made a lot of great friends, some of whom still work there.”
All along he had a small side consulting business working with colleges, school districts and other public facilities on their building maintenance systems. In 1994 he went out on his own and decided to make that consulting service a full time gig. He also continued to write and published over 300 magazine articles in various publications, some in Europe and Canada. By 2000 he was tired of the schedule of being away from home on business more than he was in Carbon County, where he really wanted to live. It was at that point that he applied for a reporter’s job at the Sun Advocate and former publisher Kevin Ashby hired him.
“I have to say with all the jobs and places I have worked, both for companies and out on my own, I have never taken so much satisfaction from a job as I have from being publisher of the two counties’ newspapers,” he said. “There are hard parts about every job, but this position has afforded me so many opportunities I would have never otherwise had. The writing and reporting parts are my favorite, but over the years as publisher I have come to really like other aspects of the business as well.”
Shaw said none of what has been accomplished in the last 10 years at the papers could have been possible without the wonderful staff he has worked with.
“I think people see this business as a pretty simple endeavor, but it is not.” he said. “It takes a lot of talent and drive to put out two newspapers a week and handle all the things that go along with it. That talent and determination lies in the people that work here, not me. While I have had to make some hard decisions about certain staff over the years, the vast majority of the people that work here are great. Actually, the hardest part of leaving this job will be not seeing these peoples faces every day. We spend a lot of time together, more than we do with our families in some cases. They are like family to me.”
During Shaw’s years as publisher, the media industry has made many changes. He sees change as accelerating in the future.
“There is a lot of talk about newspapers being dead, but they are not,” he said. “We have constantly changed to keep up with things and as most people know our website is one of the busiest in southeastern Utah. We are on Facebook and Twitter. We also have an electronic version of the paper that we called early on The Electronic Paper Boy. Other than the website, those are all things that have happened in the last 10 years. We are now looking at growth in a lot of other areas as well.”
Shaw says the community is what has kept him going, even when things were looking down.
“Old hardened reporters are supposed to separate themselves from their news stories but often it is hard not be be drawn in by some of the tales we have told,” he said. “We have done stories about the human spirit that have made me cry. In my writing career I have never done anything more interesting than all the stories I have done about veterans over the years, particularly those from World War II and Korea. Visiting them in their homes, looking at their private photos and papers, and realizing that these men and women protected us against huge evils in the world, makes one understand how much of a sacrifice they made. Almost monthly I see an obituary come in on a veteran I interviewed 10 or 12 years ago and I have to reflect on what them and their legacy.”
In recent years the paper has become more involved in helping with community activities, and has actually created some themselves. The No Grave Unadorned Project which just wrapped up this year on Memorial Day is a good example.
“People want to give me credit for that, but I deny it was my fault,” he quipped. “Actually the idea was mine, but the real work came from many great staff members to get it going. And then for it to be successful it took the community. The volunteerism around this area is unbelievable. People who have talked to me about starting it in other places always ask how we got the community to put in so much time and I just say, ‘You have to have a lot of caring people who show up with more than just their pocketbooks to do it.’ So far I know of no where else where this has caught on at the scale it has here. This is a special place in many ways.”