Steve and Dawn Mathis have sold The Lincoln County News to Brett Wesner, they announced last Thursday. The Mathises have been operating the newspaper for 30 years. Wesner is a veteran Oklahoma newspaper publisher. Through his Cordell-based company, he publishes 12 additional papers, seven of them in Oklahoma. “It was a tough decision, but one we felt we had to make,” Steve Mathis said of the sale. “I had always been told that a person will know when it is time to let go of a businesses and over the last three or so years we came to the realization it was time to move on.”
Steve Mathis, who graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in journalism in 1984, served as a restaurant manager for five years after college to support his family before getting hired to run The Lincoln County News. “It was always a dream of mine to work at a newspaper because that is what I went to school for. But after graduation I discovered that jobs in journalism were tough to come by,” he said. “I was working as a restaurant manager when I was hired by veteran journalists Randel Grigsby (deceased) and Jim Mayo – who at that time owned The Lincoln County News. They hired me to run the paper based on my degree and management experience, so I not only got that journalism opportunity I was looking for but also got to manage the business as publisher. That role eventually led to Dawn and I buying out the two partners 10 years later.”
Steve and Dawn moved to Chandler in 1989, along with their two young children. The couple
basically raised their family in the confines of The Lincoln County News office. “We actually set up a play room in the back of the building in what is the office’s library,” Dawn Mathis said. “We brought in toys, diapers, snacks, formula – whatever we needed – so that we could keep an eye on both our children and our paper simultaneously. Once our children started school
we would pick them up everyday and bring them back to the paper until we felt they were old enough to stay at home by themselves.”