At a time when thousands of news publications across the country are closing down, with print taking the hardest hit, New Jersey native who has lived in the Catskills since 2018, Jason Thomson, has decided to take up the idea that has been “floating around in my head for a while” – a new publication called the Catskills Holler.

Thomson has spent 20 years working for the Asbury Park, NJ-based publication Tri City News. This, Thomson said, has given him the skillsets he needed to “bootstrap” a publication of his own with a small pool of contributors.

“I pretty much handle everything. I'm the editor, but I handle all the production of the paper, the layout. I deal with advertisers. I write,” Thomson said of his experience at the Tri City News. “I have a design background, so graphic design, branding, that kind of stuff is what I also am into. I've kind of got my hands in all different kinds of stuff.”

Describing Tri City News as an alternative paper (think the Village Voice in the old days), Thomson wanted to bring the same “vibe” to Catskill Hollers. Noticing that the Catskills “don’t really have newspapers,” instead seeing the quarterly “glossy magazine kind of thing,” Thomson plans on releasing new issues of Catskills Holler monthly to give locals a more regular source of news.

Keeping with the alternative theme, Thomson said the publication will be “a little funkier than your standard community paper.” One section of the paper will include “Made in the Catskills,” covering small businesses, creatives and other “makers” in the area Thomson said would not normally be covered in one of the typical weekly publications. Thomson also plans on covering the arts, culture and farmers.

The first step, Thomson said, was figuring out what the paper would be about. While Thomson described the first issue as being “small” with only 24 pages, he aimed to cover a wide range of the Catskills. While many of the alternative newspapers Thomson used to follow, such as The Village Voice, have either shut down or gone online only, Thomson has another idea for his own – Catskills Holler can be read in print only, and he is up for the challenge of doing so.

Thomson said that Tri City News is also a print-only paper, a “strategic” decision to prevent the online version of the publication from competing with the print version, that he said has played out well for them. However, for Thomson, it is also about being able to unplug from the ever-expansive, ever-busy world of social media and the internet.

“Just like records and books, I feel like people are starving for analog again. Get off your phone, go to a coffee shop, pick up a free paper and enjoy it for 30 minutes and disconnect from the internet and go back to a different time when that's all we had,” Thomson said. “Based on the response I've had, a lot of people have mentioned they relate to that.”

Still, Thomson pointed out the irony that while he is trying to move readers away from constant scrolling, the Instagram account he created has been one of the main drivers to get the word out about his new publication. Thomson currently has close to 2 thousand followers and said he also used his personal account, which has a following from his previous work at restaurants, to advertise Catskills Holler.

“It's obviously super powerful. So it's like you can't really abandon it,” Thomson said. “I'm printing some flyers that I'm posting around in different local spots like coffee shops and markets and stuff. But yeah, the real driver is Instagram.”

The first issue will be out on October 2. Currently, Thomson said the publication will be at over 100 small businesses, restaurants and cafes around the area, which will be listed on the publication’s website. While Thomson said he has had people ask about subscriptions, he described those as a “pain in the butt” and would rather preserve a simpler way of consuming news.

“One of the big things is to really encourage people to get out of the house, go and support your local bookstore or coffee shop or whatever, and pick up the paper,” Thomson said. “Make it more of a ritual than getting it in the mail or reading it on the internet.”