By Krystal Bick

kbick@dailysparkstribune.com

“We have the best diversity of the state,” Andrew Barbano said. “No one can touch us.”

Thus began the first official meeting of The Daily Sparks Tribune’s weekly columnists. Some, like Barbano and his notable labor union crusades, having written opinion pieces for the paper for more than 20 years, seeing the growth, progression and even corruption of the greater northern Nevada area.

Around the table, the knowledge shows.

Travus T. Hipp, with his hearty laugh, sits tall at the table with his prominent wide-brimmed ranching hat, as perhaps one of the last honest hippies in the area.

With newspaper clippings in hand, sits University of Nevada, Reno’s prized (and arguably feared) journalism teacher, Jake Highton.

Down the table sits Larry Wilson and his 30 years of teaching at local elementary schools, writing as he said, “to keep people on an even keel given these economic times.”

Across from him, Harry Spencer brings his knowledge of the area dating back to 1945, with more than the occasional celebrity encounter in the public relations and advertising business.

David Farside, a vocal activist, can educate on the benefits of being a vegetarian as well as his bout with polio in 1949, which taught him “how to be a human being.”

Nathan Orme, the self-proclaimed “newbie” of the bunch, started writing his column only a year ago when he took the editor position.

And then there’s plumbing contractor and self-declared “Sparks Boy,” Ira Hansen. As he argues his conservative views, he has a smile on his face, jokingly calling himself “the lone voice of reason.”

Some have met before, others are meeting each other for the first time. Here are the highlights of the diverse group’s afternoon debate touching on everything from the future of newspapers to legalizing prostitution.

Q: Judging by some of the banter at the table, this is the first time a lot of you have met before, especially all in one place like this. Did you have any preconceived notions of each other just by reading each other’s columns?

HS: You can tell a lot about people based on their writing style, moreso than the content of the articles they write. … When I read the other columnists in the Sparks Tribune, I appreciate the fact they get their message out, that no two of them write alike. I like David’s (Farside) stuff because he researches it extremely well. Travus (Hipp) has a great sense of humor. Andy (Barbano) and I have bantered about on a couple of issues. … I know Jake is a great teacher because he gave my son Zach an A once. (laughs) I appreciate that.

DF: No, I didn’t have any preconceived notions. I thought Ira had more hair on his head but that’s about all.

AB: The only preconceived notion that I’ve been disabused of today was that I fully expected Ira (Hansen) to be both older and to have horns. Maybe they only appear in the full moon. (laughter)

LW: I expected fully to find a very diverse group of people and we probably couldn’t agree on any one solution to anything, but we would all figure out a way to solve all the Earth’s problems at one point. It’s kind of intriguing to get together and see what kind of group we really do have here and I think it’s kind of neat we represent a cross section of our whole community both locally and nationally, maybe even the world.

On the future of The Sparks Tribune and print media:

TH: Well, that’s all well and good, but let’s cut to the chase. We are all at this point involved in an archaic form that is fading so fast that it’s barely capable of keeping a paper on the streets in major cities.… I’m sorry but the advertising base of print media is dead, OK? So what we should be talking about here is if we want to continue to propagate our own propaganda then we had better come up with either a form or a system or a merchandizing operation that will allow the Sparks Tribune at all to continue to publish.

IH: I remember ol’ [newspaper columnist] Ralph Heller [and] his whole take was to keep the Sparks Tribune going and to actually make it grow. Now realistically, Travus (Hipp) is completely correct that it’s a shrinking market. I mean the ability to see newspapers in the future as you would in the past, is gone. There are so many outlets. But there’s still going to be a market, somewhere… What Ralph suggested, which always seemed wise to me, is that you have to diversify. Honestly our community isn’t as leftist as our column base is, and this is not criticism of anybody in the room.…The reality is, to create a difference between us and the (Reno) Gazette Journal is the way for the Tribune to survive and grow.

JH: To follow up on Travus, I think the real question for all of us, is will we have a physical newspaper in our hands in five years? That’s a question for all of us.

TH: Save the trees!

JH: No, I’m serious, people are not advertising in newspapers. They can read the newspaper free online. Why should they buy the Sparks Tribune or the Reno Gazette Journal or The New York Times if they can read it free?

AB: I disagree with Travus more than I do Ira. With respect to the future of print, on the one hand, yeah, promoting more diversity is a good idea, but the problem with newspapers is their decreasing relevance to their community and that’s a reflection of corporatism. In yesterday’s Gazette-Journal, you saw an article … of a newsletter in Spanish Springs, a free newsletter that has 40 advertisers in it because they are relevant to their community. I made several proposals to the owner of this newspaper on how to make the Tribune relevant and up the circulation and promote it. There is a way to make the Tribune increasingly relevant to up the print circulation and newspapers and print will always be with us. You cannot do everything on a Web site that you can do in print, starting with the fact that a print paper is a lot faster to use, but you have to make the paper much more relevant than we are making newspapers today. The elements of success in the Tribune are better than any other paper in the state.

Q: What is the most controversial column or column you have regretted writing for the Sparks Tribune?

DF: Actually, I got the most response on an article that I wrote about Hilary Clinton running as an Independent. And I couldn’t believe it. On my blog, I had a lot of hits, a lot of responses and I was surprised to see how many people really supported the idea of Hilary Clinton running as an Independent. Regrettable? No, I don’t have any regrets of anything I’ve written.

AB: My biggest regret and it’s something we all need to remember, is that words hurt. About 15 to 20 years ago … I found out that … the First Federal Savings Branch in Carson City had been robbed.… Apparently, federal law says that until you have proof that you’re in a high crime area you don’t have to go through the expense of surveillance video …so First Federal in Carson City did not have video surveillance and I printed that story as a good joke in the Tribune.… As it so turned out, there was a very nasty woman in the top three hierarchy at First Federal that did not like their director of security.… They saw my article in the Tribune and she used my article in the Tribune as an excuse to fire this gentleman, even though he had been lobbying for two freaking years to put video surveillance at all locations. This man lost his job because of my column. That column is my biggest regret because that man lost his job because of what I reported and it was misused by the executives at First Federal Savings. We need to remember that your words can hurt, even unintentionally.

TH: I would have to say my most controversial column, because I’ve written it four or five times, a couple of times for the Trib and various other papers, is my recommendation to bulldoze the schools and the entire public education system as it presently exists and start paying teachers to supervise the home educational accomplishments of kids who now have the resources to do college PhD level work and research and studying in their own closet if they want to.

IH: The biggest regret I have is that some of my columns I’ve actually said things that reading back it was a petty thing at the moment that I shouldn’t have done in the long run.

JH: I like to think I’ve written a lot of good columns but one of my favorites is I compared Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman to Jesus and I know that outraged a lot of people but by God, these two people were far more Christian than most Christians ever are.

NO: I wish in the day-to-day grind in getting this newspaper out that I had the time that Andy has or some of these guys have … to do a little more research and do a little more digging and maybe I guess participate in my own column a little more than I do.… It did feel good one time when a woman came in, older lady, and actually recognized me and made a comment on one of the columns.

AB: Did she ask for a date?

NO: No, (laughs) but I think she wanted to. But it’s always a good feeling to know that, wow, OK, somebody actually reads this and cares enough to remember.

Q: What do you think has been your greatest accomplishment as a professional columnist?

HS: My greatest accomplishment was getting laid off by the Reno Gazette-Journal because I have the temerity to help a friend in a political contest. The word came down that I would be put on furlough until the election was over. The election was over eight years ago, so thank God for the Sparks Trib.

DF: A great accomplishment is when I received calls from people higher up in politics and said, ‘David, I’m glad you wrote that, now I have some information for you.’ And you don’t have to go to them, they come to you and I think that’s an accomplishment for a columnist when you can stir that kind of interest and gain confidence of not necessarily a whistleblower but someone on the inside.

AB: In 1991, my Tribune column on forecasting what kind of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas would be and accurately I might add. It was picked up by the Los Angeles and San Francisco daily legal journals and not being a lawyer and scoring those two publications made me feel pretty good. Second, I wrote a four-part series in 1988 on how to steal an election on a computer and one of the four was picked up by the Las Vegas Review Journal. It accurately, and I wasn’t alone in this, predicted what would happen in Florida in 2000.

LW: I’ve had some minor accomplishments.… I really get feedback from people in the community from time to time. They come up and tell me they read my stuff and that they like it and that sort of thing. That’s a real ego boost.

IH: I had one day in particular when my column ran in the Sparks Tribune, the Elko Daily Free Press, The Nevada Appeal, I was doing my talk radio show and I got interviewed by a television station and on the same day I got interviewed by J.R. Reynolds on another radio show. So I was like ‘Wow for a little ol’ Sparks Boy, I’ve been in a lot of different media outlets at the same time. And people respected our opinion and frankly what the column does is it gives us a level of credibility that as individuals we really don’t earn (laughs). Technically, I’m not really a professional journalist. I’m in fact a plumbing contractor and I’m proud of my blue collar roots and I still every day go to work and today I have dirt under my fingernails from the work I did yesterday in the field so I’m not one of these guys that are living in, no offense professor, in the university ivory towers. I’m on the ground every day with real people doing real things and that’s what I write about in my column every Sunday.

JH: I’m grateful … for the Sparks Tribune. They have never ever censored me and I have written some controversial stuff. For example, I had a two-part series saying we should legalize prostitution, not in Nevada but the whole country. … Another time I urged legalization of all drugs. Again, controversial ideas, trying to suggest to some minds. In short, I’m freer in academia and with the Sparks Tribune than I ever was in newspapers. … I’ve really had no impact at all because I write from the heart and I write from the brain and it’s not shared by most people, including my wife.

NO: I haven’t been doing this long enough to have an impact. I hope to have one at some point. … As a relatively young, new newspaper editor, the thing that I’m probably most proud of is when we sent our entries to The Nevada Press Association this year, a good chunk of them were from journalism students over at UNR and I like to hope with at least a little bit of help from me and largely, 99 percent due to their own ability, they came back with a handful of awards. So I was able to send some students away with plaques that say First Place or Third Place or whatever it is that has their name on it.