Since the closure of the Rocky Mountain News earlier this year, the bottom line hasn’t improved much for the newspaper industry. Even the mammoth New York Times Company is trying to find buyers for one of its big papers, The Boston Globe, where cuts have workers mulling mid- to late-career changes.

While some journalists, like former Rocky transportation reporter Kevin Flynn, have migrated online in search of a profitable, newspaper-less destiny, his former colleague, M. E. Sprengelmeyer, is going retro. Sprengelmeyer, an experienced Washington, D.C., correspondent bought a weekly newspaper in New Mexico: the Guadalupe County Communicator, circulation 2,000, according to the Times.

But, oh, “watch out for the hole in the floor” of the office, where Sprengelmeyer serves as owner, publisher, editor, primary writer, photographer, and occasionally ad salesman. He’s enjoying the experience, feels he’s serving the community in responsible ways, and even has visions of expanding the paper to two days a week—though he admits he often works to exhaustion.

“I couldn’t do this if I had a family,” he says. “But it feels like it matters, and I’m having fun.”