Longtime publisher seen as pillar in community, but not without controversy
By Lauren Yates
One week, the “For Sale” sign is in the window of the Tupper Lake Free Press newsroom on Park Street.
Next week, it may not be there.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
Free Press publisher Dan McClelland, who’s worked at the weekly for almost 47 years, says he’s ready to sell the newspaper business and retire now that he’s reached 70 years old — but he also says he’s in the prime of his writing career, producing better stories than ever.
“I’ve put too much into this community to just walk away,” he said.
And as Tupper Lake locals watch the window sign disappear and reappear, they wonder if the paper with more than a century of history will last another year.
“There isn’t a week that goes by without someone saying, ‘Please don’t close the Free Press,’” McClelland said.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
A family business
Right now, McClelland’s newsroom is a four-person family affair. Judy, McClelland’s wife, manages advertising and the books. Judy’s niece, Phyllis Larabie, helps with circulation and billing. McClelland’s son Ben designs the pages.
McClelland acts as reporter, editor, publisher and opinion writer with some provocative editorials. Circulation, he says, is 2,000 to 2,500 papers per week.
While McClelland isn’t interested in selling the Free Press building at 136 Park St., which is filled with relics from the paper’s past, he’s attempted for years to sell the newspaper to various publishers — notably to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in Saranac Lake, which is owned by West Virginia-based publisher Ogden Newspapers.
In 2022, McClelland said he offered the Free Press to then-Enterprise Publisher Trevor Evans for just $1. McClelland’s only condition was that he remain employed as a reporter, Evans said.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
Evans said no thanks — twice. Evans told the Explorer that Ogden would have had to pump a “considerable” amount of work into changing the Free Press, starting with including a police blotter, which has never been part of the weekly.
McClelland also publishes the Gouverneur Tribune Press in St. Lawrence County, which he said has the same circulation as the Free Press. He said the paper is “doing well” and he doesn’t have intentions to sell it.
His Tupper Lake paper he says, makes a “small profit” some years and “breaks even” in others. He derives at least part of his income from several of rental properties he owns and manages across Tupper Lake.
The paper’s long history
Tupper Lake’s first community newspaper was the Tupper Lake Herald, started in 1895 by Postmaster Ernest Fletcher and P.J. Walsh, according to historic newspaper archives. In 1931, former Tupper Lake school principal L.P. Quinn founded the Tupper Lake Free Press. It was published with a used linotype machine and flatbed press.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
The Press bought the Herald in 1937. The combined papers’ masthead still reads as “The Tupper Lake Free Press and the Tupper Lake Herald.” But today, the “Free” in Tupper Lake Free Press is printed in a tiny 3-point font. McClelland cited paper thefts as the reason.
During more than a century of operations, the Free Press has known only three editors. The first was Len Hoffman. Next, came longtime editor and Tupper Lake historian Louis J. Simmons. He passed the reins to McClelland in 1977. Simmons stayed at the Free Press to mentor McClelland for years, infamously wearing out three newsroom stools “by the seat of his pants” by the time he died in 1995.
The McClelland years
An Ontario native, McClelland started his journalism career at the student paper at Queen’s University in Kingston. After graduating, he spent a year at a local paper under editor John Morris before he and Morris bought the Tupper Lake Free Press from Simmons in 1977, just as the paper had fallen on hard times and was about to “call it quits.” McClelland came to the Free Press as managing editor.
It was November, and McClelland had never before been to the village. He remembered the town as a “wild west” with 35 bars and lots of charm with locals exchanging hellos, Canadian tourists speaking French and lumberjacks lounging at the old hotels.
“I sort of had the feeling right away that this was maybe a good place to be, you know?” McClelland said. “It just felt right.”
The paper’s appearance changed drastically with McClelland’s arrival. He and Morris scrapped the old linotype, which had become harder to service as phototypesetting and computerized typesetting became industry standards. They outsourced printing to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in Saranac Lake, where the Free Press and the Gouverneur Tribune are still printed today.
McClelland found himself immediately embedded in the Tupper Lake community. The first Monday after his arrival, he joined the chamber of commerce, later becoming its president.
Over the years, he’s accrued a massive list of volunteer board and committee credentials in the town. He’s been a member of the Prison Task Force that tried to bring a prison to Tupper in the 1990s, a Lions Club president, a Tupper Lake History Museum board member, a board member of Next Stop! Tupper Lake — a railroad advocacy group that helped fund reconstruction of the town’s railroad station — among a host of other positions.
McClelland claims to have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for town projects through his newspaper, including construction of the railroad station and the village bandshell.
“I became Mr. Promotion in Tupper Lake,” McClelland said.
And all of it has ended up in the Tupper Lake Free Press.
Tupper Lake’s cheerleader
While traditional journalistic ethics call on reporters to remain impartial and balanced in their coverage, McClelland admits that he inserts his opinions and advocacy into news stories and editorials.
“I used the paper, from the very beginning, as a cheerleader for the community — to promote the good things here, to try to bring things here that would help the town,” McClelland said. “I haven’t been a journalist as much as I’ve been a promoter.”
He regrets that he didn’t have more influence on matters such as the closing of the Big Tupper Ski Area, which he fought to stop.
“I wasn’t powerful enough editorially,” he said. “It was a bad move, and it’s crippled Tupper Lake to this day since.”
McClelland also admits he intentionally excludes opposing voices from his stories, specifically noting environmental advocacy groups who fought against projects he thought would be good for Tupper Lake, like the failed Adirondack Club and Resort development proposal.
“One of the environmental groups one time said, ‘You’re not being fair, you’re not letting us tell our side. And I said, ‘No — because it’s my newspaper, and I don’t care what you think. You’re not from Tupper Lake … I didn’t want to give them a voice in my newspaper because they didn’t deserve that voice. They were interfering with our lives here.”
— Dan McClelland
McClelland recently published editorials in the Free Press that he said were intended to get the Tupper Lake Central School District’s proposed 2024 budget “nixed,” as well as editorials calling on the district’s board of education to scrap its final three candidates in a search to replace outgoing district Superintendent Russell Bartlett. He didn’t believe any of the candidates were qualified and that the proposed 8.75% tax levy increase was too high.
“It’s hard for property owners here,” he told the Explorer.
Jane Whitmore, the board’s president and longtime member, said she was hurt that McClelland didn’t reach out to her or her board members for comment when covering the budget and superintendent search. He did interview former board member Korey Kenniston, who resigned last month in protest against the three superintendent candidates. Kenniston’s father Mike had been in the running for superintendent but did not make the cut.
Whitmore said that the school board is “very unhappy” with how McClelland handled the editorials.
“You can’t put a price on a child’s education,” she said.
Several board members and community members discussed cutting Tupper Lake schools’ ties with the Free Press — the district’s only official paper — but Whitmore said they ultimately couldn’t, citing state law.
The Enterprise also covers Tupper Lake, circulates within the district, and would be eligible as an official paper for the district under state law, according to guidance from the New York State School Boards Association. However, NYSSBA Chief Communications and Marketing Officer David Albert said that newspapers have sued municipalities in the past for dropping their publication based on its coverage, citing the First Amendment.
The district’s budget ultimately passed with 622 voters in favor and 506 against, and the board has selected a superintendent from among the three candidates. On Monday, the board chose Jaycee Welsh from the LaFargeville Central School District in Jefferson County. But Whitmore said she’s still “hurt” by McClelland’s coverage.
A community resource
At the same time, McClelland’s paper is beloved and well-read in the community. Whitmore said McClelland covers local events and student activities well, and she still remembers the stories he wrote memorializing both of her parents after they died.
A community resource that prints local obituaries, classifieds and notices, McClelland’s paper is also an official paper of the town and village of Tupper Lake and Franklin County.
“Dan has been taking care of Tupper Lake for years and years and years,” said Jon Kopp, the Tupper Lake town historian. “He writes stories that just run out of him. His ability to write has always fascinated me.”
McClelland sees himself as a watchdog of the local government boards whose meetings he routinely attends.
“I love it every day,” McClelland said. “It’s been a great run.”
But he’s thinking more and more about retirement and future health.
“I don’t need to stop, but I just think, ‘What if I get sick?’” he said.
Last Christmas, he skipped publishing an issue of the Free Press — the first time in his 46 years at the paper — to spend time with family.
He’s worried that, without the Free Press, local officials could get away with anything they wanted. But McClelland said he’s choosy about finding the “right” buyer. Ideally, he said, they’d be someone just like him.
“I’m looking for another Dan McClelland,” he said with a laugh.
Dan probs doesn’t remember this but I worked for another media organization over a decade ago and chatted with him about journalism… he talked kindly about how every media organization has a bias… and his was about community love. I have never stopped thinking about that and it informs me to this day!
Dan may think he is Tuppers’ biggest cheerleader but his reporting has been a big cause of division in the town. He knowingly presents only one side(his own) of an issue out there. Specifically on the ACR project he presented the rosy picture the “developers” wanted out ther to garner public support. To this day it is a source of division in the community.
Ultimately he was proven wrong as the development never even came close to happening and the face of the project left town under cover of darkness never to be seen or heard from again. And the developers were sued by their own lawyers and planners for not being paid to the tune of $10 Million or more. But of course nothing was ever reported about that by Dan.
Great article! Kudos to Dan for sticking with his beliefs for his town and area. Where would we be without the history and fortitude of our Nation’s weeklies? I was fortunate early in my career to work with Denton Publications on a number of their weeklies plus others in Western NY. It was never about the pay but the satisfaction of a job well done for yourself and your neighbors to the best of your ability. All the best in your next chapter Mr. McClelland.