BY MILES LAYTON

It’s 2 a.m. 

I can’t sleep because Bruce Mitchell’s legacy is on my mind, how he affected my life and that of the many other people who remember his impact as the founder and longtime publisher of The Athens News, a community newspaper in Athens, Ohio, home of Ohio University.    

Though Mitchell died over a week ago, I’m told the local corporate media hasn’t reported his death with a proper tribute. However, news spread fast that Mitchell, 71, died April 29, 2025, at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Fla.  

Athens City Council member Solveig Spjeldnes was Mitchell’s neighbor East State Street for many years.  

“Bruce co-created the Athens News that brought news and information about activities and events,” she said. “Their paper helped spread the positive and caring culture to everyone who chose to visit or call Athens home. Bruce was a colorful character who brought laughter and joy to everyone he met. He and his wife Susan donated to many charities and causes. He set a standard for showing respect to everyone and ethics to everything he did. RIP to Bruce. So sad for his loving wife Susan and his son Will. Such a loss.”  

According to Mitchell’s obituary, after four years of participating in Vietnam War protests and other campus activism, Mitchell graduated from Ohio University in 1975.

Mitchell was a campus radical.  

“As a soon-to-be graduating senior in the spring of 1977, I was familiar with Bruce from his high profile during student protests throughout my four years at Ohio University,” said Terry Smith, who would later serve as editor of The Athens News for around 34 years. “This included his organizing efforts for the Student Workers Union, which the university succeeded in crushing.”  

Mitchell founded The Athens News in 1977 when he realized that he could build a newspaper that would do a better job of covering the Athens community.

“In the spring of ’77, Bruce gained notoriety for launching an ‘underground newspaper’ in Athens, The Athens ‘A’ News,” Smith said. “This was before ‘alternative newspaper’ became the default label for upstart, mainly liberal tabloid weeklies that cropped up all over the U.S. and Canada as alternatives to the local mainstream press. e.g., The Village Voice, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Boston Phoenix, L.A. Weekly and others.” 

It seems so simple now, but it took guts for Mitchell to challenge the county’s long-established newspaper, The Athens Messenger, a publication that was in a far stronger place than the fading shadow it is today. Truly, Mitchell and other like-minded people who shared his revolutionary ideals made The Athens News, aka the ANews, into an award-winning community newspaper that challenged the establishment, whether it was Cutler Hall or the Athens City Council.  

“Bruce was a journalistic pioneer. Back in the late 1970’s when legacy journalism was king, Bruce decided to give people an alternative — a free, once a week newspaper that covered pop culture as well as taking on local power brokers with hard-hitting journalism,” said Tom Hodson, director emeritus of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and WOUB Public Media at Ohio University. “He started the Athens ‘A’ News as an ‘alternative’ to the locally family-owned newspaper giant. Bruce’s paper was free and available everywhere in town. It soon picked up a loyal following for its guts and its brash approach to power. He made the Athens News a success when many like ventures were failures. Bruce worked tirelessly to give people a quality product during times when most alternative style newspapers failed.”  

The Athens News’ success inspired generations of journalists who passed through Athens over the years, including myself – that’s Mitchell’s true legacy. Wherever I’ve worked as a reporter or editor, I’ve worked hard to carry those values and ideals forward.

Each edition of the Athens News was a “must read” newspaper when it hit the streets.   

“Bruce brought the daily, on-the-street news into your home — he made The Athens News part of your life, from the Your View section, to events that wouldn’t get coverage otherwise,” said Warren Jeffers, a member of the Athens Regional Planning Commission. “Bruce and his staff did an excellent job of keeping people informed. That news view is greatly missed.”  

Back in 1977, The Athens News started small but quickly gained a foothold and following in Athens. 

“That first year, Bruce had no idea how to run a newspaper, including the absolute necessity of selling ads. But he quickly learned, and his mastery of advertising sales and marketing and importantly, training of ad salespeople more than any other factor led to The Athens News’ success,” Smith said.

In an article from The Athens News’ archives, Guy Philips, formerly the longtime co-owner, recalled the paper’s staff as they worked long hours to establish it as a viable news business.

“It was rough,” he admitted. “The readership was always building, but we covered some stuff that people didn’t like. It was a challenge to community standards.”

At one point, Philips noted, news coverage so upset the local establishment that the Athens Chamber of Commerce “was basically trying to organize a boycott” of the paper.

A typical day at work for The Athens News staff back in the day would involve a huge amount of work, followed by some serious decompression at an uptown Athens bar. Part of the excitement of the early days, Philips said, was that the small staff was made up pretty exclusively of young people, just getting their start in the world of journalism.

“Everybody was in their early 20s,” he recalled. “We worked hard, and we played just as hard.”

Mitchell was a good businessman who knew what advertisers and readers wanted.  

“Bruce was less a journalist than a canny, aggressive businessperson,” Smith said. “While his gimmicky editorial features, such as Landlord of the Month and the Dope Wizard where an anonymous ‘expert’ reported on what sort of marijuana – mainly weed – were in town that week and rated the quality of said recreational drugs attracted readers in droves, he eventually realized that in a relatively small market like Athens County, a newspaper couldn’t survive without appealing to a broad cross-section of the population, including, crucially, OU students.”

Smith continued, “We always made it a point to ensure that each issue of the paper appealed to both town and gown and always carried a sizeable stable of student freelance reporters and photographers. Bruce never asked me to cut corners on my freelance budget.”  

Groundbreaking Journalism

What started out with articles in 1977 like Dope-A-Scope, about where to find/prices of drugs, ended up producing strong investigative reporting that exposed abusive, greedy landlords and intensive coverage of policies and personalities at Ohio University. 

Award-winning journalist Richard Heck began his career at The Athens News.    

“Bruce was an accomplished leader who, with unlimited energy, was a talented promoter and organizer. He had the uncanny ability to hire a successful team at The Athens News while also providing many of us with our first professional jobs,” he said. 

The Athens News reported on salaries of Athens City/County Officials, Ohio University’s top administrators and stories about corruption at all levels of local government. The Athens News was known for being fearless – unafraid to champion progressive values and challenge the status quo.  

“Bruce lived for pushing progressive issues and blasting allegedly corrupt officials on the editorial pages while showing our biases in story selection, and was never happier than when the newspaper succeeded in one of its editorial crusades,” Smith said.

Commitment to Community

The Athens News’ evolved from being a “wild alternative weekly” to being a blend between alt weekly and community newspaper.    

“When I arrived in 1986, an experienced reporter from several community newspapers and small dailies in the Ohio Valley and out West, The Athens News has already made the transition from wild alternative  weekly to alt weekly/community newspaper,” Smith said. “My arrival, with my traditional journalism background, just sealed that transition, and with Bruce’s full approval, The A News continued to burnish its reputation as a quality local news source that always tried to get conflicting viewpoints represented in stories. But that didn’t mean we avoided wading into local politics and aggressively so.”

This is a great quote from Philips – “I think what makes me most proud about being involved with the paper is not the financial return,” he said. “First and foremost, we serve the community. I think we’ve had a very strong voice in the community, and we’ve helped form Athens.”

If corporate news outlets followed this principle, not only would they have a stronger bottom line, but the communities they serve would be better informed. Corporate executives can blame the changing tide of newspapers on the internet and emergence of social media, but that’s not true because people know they are getting less coverage from a news outlet that doesn’t invest in itself or the community — that’s why folks have moved onto media outlets like the Athens Independent or the Albemarle Observer.

Mitchell invested time not only into The Athens News but the community in events like the big bicycle race – Athens Brick Criterium – and that epic annual Halloween party to town.

Between 1986 to 1998, the annual “Cycling Classic” featured a central event Criterium race around the main uptown area. In its prime, big-name racers such as Tour de France winner Greg LeMond and other notable professional bicycle racers participated, resulting in thousands flocking to Athens to view the spectacle, according to The Athens News archives.  Mitchell was heavily involved with the race for all of its 12 years. He served as both assistant and lead director, seeing it through to the end. In fact, The Athens News even had its own all-female cycling team that traveled the country racing.

Since the 1970s,  Halloween was the biggest and best party in Ohio for decades. In 1987, when Mitchell and Pat Sauber were co-chairs of the Clean and Safe Halloween Committee, they approached city council with the idea of actually closing the street and making the street party legal.

Mitchell said the purpose of a legal street closing and sanctioned party was to create a focal point for the event, according to the Athens News’ archives. With the street closed, the committee offered to construct a bandstand across the north end of the street, with the idea that the crowd would be dispersed over a wider area.

According to the Athens News’ archives, both city and committee officials agreed that the party was the celebration’s largest crowd in its controversial history, with more than 12,000-15,000 in attendance — according to official estimates.

“Back in the day” when The Athens News was located in the heart of Court Street, staffers would cover the big party from beginning to end. From their perch on the second floor at 14 North Court Street, Mitchell and others had a bird’s eye view of the party that featured all sorts of wild costumes and crazy happenings too numerous to mention over the years. 

“Bruce led the business community to form the Clean and Safe Halloween Committee to bring structure and safety to the event when the city government failed to do so. That effort succeeded and still exists 30 years later,” Heck said.  

A lot of folks remember when front cover of the Athens News’ annual Halloween edition had a cool graphic/design and the stories inside included haunted tales and many photos of the crowds – photos that would be posted to the newspaper’s website in later years. 

And it wasn’t just the Halloween edition that stood out, but the annual Back to School edition and Best of Athens editions that everyone in Athens picked up. The Back to School special editions shared valuable information with new students about where to go, what to do, what not to do, and welcomed these Bobcats to Athens. 

As a point of pride, many longtime restaurants and businesses framed stories that announced that they represented the Best of Athens, whether it was Casa Nueva’s fine Bloody Mary’s or Avalanche Pizza’s topnotch pizzas. Believe it or not, The Athens News held an awards ceremony that everyone attended to accept their plaques each year. 

Quiet Part Out Loud

In the fall of 2014, The Athens News was purchased by Adams Publishing Group, who had acquired the Athens Messenger earlier that year. In 2015, Mitchell retired from publishing, and lived out his long-time dream of relocating to Key West.  

I’ll say the quiet part out loud – despite the valiant efforts by editors and writers since The Athens News was sold to APG, it has never been the same since Mitchell left. Based on my experience when I served as Region Editor for APG Ohio, I can say that corporate management never quite understood or appreciated the gem that they had, and that’s too bad because what Mitchell and others passionately supported over the years was a publication that had a far reaching impact on Athens County. 

“Bottom line, Bruce’s aggressive approach to running a newspaper in a competitive environment in a small city more than any other factor led to its success,” Smith said. “His legacy is being responsible for giving the city of Athens a quality news product for nearly four decades, something that continued purely on that momentum for several years after he sold the paper in 2015.” 

See Mitchell’s obituary – A celebration of life for Athens friends will be held on Saturday, May 24. Details will follow.