Editor and publisher Dave Mitchell, 61, at noon Wednesday
with mixed emotions told the staff of The Point Reyes Light he
had just sold the newspaper’s stock to Robert Plotkin, 35, of Bolinas.
The change of ownership will be celebrated at noon
Friday, Nov. 4, at The Light with champagne, beer, sodas, snacks,
and a ceremonial passing of a golden muckrake – muckraking once
having been an epithet for investigative reporting. The public is invited.
Mitchell had owned the newspaper for half its 57 years.
In 1979 while The Light was published by Mitchell and his former
wife Cathy, it received a Pulitzer Prize for an exposé of the
Synanon cult. Once a drug-rehabilitation group, Synanon while located
in Marshall had evolved into a violent, lawbreaking, corporate cult.
Plotkin with his wife Lys and son Max lives on the
Big Mesa in Bolinas. He is a former Monterey County prosecutor with
a 2003 master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at
Columbia University.
As a freelance photographer and reporter, Plotkin’s
writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The
Chicago Tribune, The New York Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle,
and The Jerusalem Post. For The Post, Plotkin reported
on the Israeli invasion of Jenin and interviewed a Hamas leader in Gaza.
As The Light’s new editor and publisher,
Plotkin this week said he has no plans for replacing staff. Mitchell
will remain at the paper parttime as editor and publisher emeritus.
As such he will continue to write his column Sparsely
Sage and Timely, act as a consultant to the new ownership, and on
occasion will fill in as editor when the Plotkins are away.
The new publisher is buying The Light’s
stock just after the paper began breaking even this year following a
$30,000 loss last year.
However, a number of significant expenditures are
looming, particularly the cost of updating the paper’s old computer
network. Plotkin said he is prepared for these expenses as well as for
the cost of other improvements to the paper’s operations.
Dave Rogers of Inverness, a colorful editor who wore
a pistol on his hip, founded The Light under the name The
Baywood Press on March 1, 1948. Don and Clara Mae DeWolfe, who owned
the newspaper from 1958 to 1970, changed its name to The Point Reyes
Light in 1966.
Michael and Annabelle Gahagan, who bought The Light
from the DeWolfes, sold the paper to Dave and Cathy Mitchell in August
1975. Both had worked for other papers, having met while earning their
masters’ degrees in Journalism at Stanford University.
When the Mitchells divorced in 1981, the paper was
bought by Rosalie Laird, and Mitchell went to work for the old San
Francisco Examiner. During two years at The Examiner, Mitchell
covered (among other things) the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala
and the post-war refugee crisis that followed the US pullout from Southeast
Asia.
In December 1983, Mitchell went to court and took
The Light back from Laird in a default action.
As editor of The Light, Mitchell has been a
mentor to dozens of young reporters, often stressing that they can be
as professional at a small-town weekly as at a big-city daily. The only
difference is the amount of territory they cover.
Indeed, while Mitchell was publisher of The Light,
it won 108 regional, state, and national journalism awards plus the
Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service.
Only six weeklies (including the 90,000-circulation
alternative Willimette Week, which won an Investigative Reporting
prize this year), have won a Pulitzer in any category since newspaperman
Joseph Pulitzer created the prizes in 1917.