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‘The Pulp’: New non-profit news organization squeezed from the fruits of the ‘Missoula Independent’

Erika Fredrickson and Matthew Frank, founders of ‘The Pulp.’

This week on Front Row Center, Lauren Korn speaks with Erika Fredrickson and Matthew Frank, former Missoula Independent reporters and the founders of The Pulp, a new independent, non-profit news organization covering politics, arts, and culture in Missoula, Montana.

The Missoula Independent, lovingly referred to as the “Indy,” was an alternative weekly newspaper published (in print!) from 1991-2018 in Missoula. The paper was shuttered in 2018, shortly after the staff unionized under the new ownership of Lee Enterprises, which owns seventy-seven newspapers in the U.S., including the Missoulian, the Billings Gazette, the Independent Record (Helena), the Montana Standard (Butte), and other publications in Montana.

Fredrickson, the defunct paper’s Arts & Culture Editor (2008-2018), has been organizing former Indy staffers and other Missoula residents since its shuttering. The Pulp launched its website mid-September, 2023; it will begin as an online-only news source, though Frank says the organization is also interested in eventually including a print component. The Pulp held a community fundraiser for two weeks in late September.

Lauren R. Korn holds an M.A. in poetry from the University of New Brunswick, where she was the recipient of the Tom Riesterer Memorial Prize and the Angela Ludan Levine Memorial Book Prize. A former bookseller and the former Director of the Montana Book Festival, she is now an Arts and Culture Producer at Montana Public Radio and the host of it’s literature-based radio program and podcast, ‘The Write Question.’
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