By Alan Kirkpatrick
He made a name for himself during the most liberal decade in the nation's most liberal metropolis. He was the leftist journalist covering the Left. In reality, he was never that far above the underground press and antiestablishment politics he reported on.
A couple of decades later, Tim Findley ('65) still believes the alternative press should serve the discontented and disenfranchised.
Back then he operated out of San Francisco. Now HQ is Fallon, Nev.
"What we're really doing here is trying to tell these people's stories with a sense of independent journalism," he said.
Many will find it hard to believe who "these people" are, though.
Cattlemen. Ranchers. Farmers.
"The established media and the establishment schools of journalism regard these people as crazies, but what we are trying to do is good independent journalism. It really is a lot like the underground press of the 1960s and 1970s," Findley said.
When it comes to covering country life, he said, the media are "overgreen" and have been misled by "righteously misguided" environmental and governmental interests.
"They've taken on a kind of higher liberal stance than what is realistic," he said. "People don't always understand that farmers and ranchers are the little guys. There isn't a lot of understanding about what rural life is really like today. Rurals are just underrepresented."
He understands how his views raise eyebrows among his contemporaries.
"I have taken on the stance of seemingly defending the wrong side," he said.
But those who dispute his cause should consider the source.
"Tim Findley is the best reporter I have ever met. Period. I wish I could be that good," said Paul Danish, who worked with Findley on the Colorado Daily when both were studying journalism at CU and regularly butting heads with administrators.
"One thing that we learned was how to be sustained when holding a very unpopular position,'' he said.
He recalled how he and Findley ended up on the West Coast.
"Someone was here from the San Francisco Chronicle and gave a speech on not sacrificing journalistic principles. Tim and I jumped up and said, 'We won't compromise our principles! Hire us!'
"To our utter amazement, they did."
Danish stayed in San Francisco about a year before returning to Boulder, where he is a journalist and Boulder County commissioner.
Findley stuck.
In San Francisco, he gained fame for breaking much of the news in the Patty Hearst case at the Chronicle. He also worked for KPIX-TV and KGO-TV, was an associate editor for Rolling Stone, bureau manager for UPI and principal assistant to California State Assembly speaker Willie L. Brown. In 1976, he wrote "The SLA," about the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that kidnapped Hearst.
Findley earned awards in journalism and public service. He also taught news writing at San Francisco State University.
Then he left.
"I was adopted by Crow Indians, and where we live is near the Shoshone-Paiute reserve," he said.
"I unplugged myself from major market employment in large part because I was finally just fed up with how journalism today is managed by consultants and mostly-manipulated opinion polls. That's just not what I had envisioned back in Hellems, no matter how much better it pays.
"I made a living and a reputation by making it a rule never to run with the pack, but I saw that pack grow every year and found myself more and more the unwelcome rogue."
Last May, Findley started The Magpie & Reese River Reveille, proclaiming "Country Truth in Black and White." It was his 8.5-by-11-inch weekly spin on landowners' rights, bureaucratic arrogance and the local social fabric.
It was incisive, witty and thoughtful.
It lasted six weeks.
"Nobody in his or her right mind today tries to start a new country newspaper. That's another reason for believing they were right when they called me 'insane' in Boulder lo those 30 years ago.
"By the time we got the ad base going, the backers said, 'We want to ease off.'
"But it did improve the quality of the local paper."
Findley continues to press his views, though, in articles for other sympathetic publications and by working with ranchers' rights groups such as the Paragon Foundation and People in the West.
"There is a lot of independent rural journalism trying to survive that people don't know about," he said.
"The Magpie may be dead, but the idea behind it is still there. I haven't given up on the issue. There's a sort of general interest in resuming a regional weekly publication of some kind. The need for that kind of thing is still going on.
"I was just trying somehow to find some middle ground, and that's what it was really all about."
