Where Print Is King

In the college town of Oxford, Ohio, the seventy-four-year-old former mayor is a paperboy. 

Every Friday, more than a dozen retirees gather in a large conference room in a building owned by Miami University of Ohio to collect roughly sixteen hundred copies of the Oxford Free Press, their town’s weekly newspaper. They divide the stacked papers, each grabbing a couple hundred to distribute around the university campus and all over town—at the local Starbucks, the Kroger grocery store, the senior living community, and four hotels.

Bill Snavely, Oxford’s former mayor, has been delivering the Free Press on alternate Fridays since the first edition of the paper was printed, in July of 2024, back when he still led the local government. “This newspaper just means a lot to me and means a lot to our community, and so it was a personal thing,” he told CJR. “It had nothing, really, to do with politics or with my position in the city. It was just something that I felt I could and should do.”