Couple becomes unlikely restaurateurs, opening café to keep tiny Texas town's newspaper afloat
Marfa, Texas — If it's morning in Marfa, Texas, the Sentinel, a local café, is the place to be. There's hot coffee and oversized breakfast tacos. Business is booming, but it's more than just money they're printing.
Tucked away in a small corner of the café is the business for which it's named: The Big Bend Sentinel, the area's weekly newspaper keeping watch over this part of West Texas for 99 years. It's a menu that goes beyond restaurant fare, serving scoops to a town hungry for local news.
Maisie Crow and Max Kabat moved to Marfa from New York City in 2016 in search of community. Then, in 2019, the paper's owners approached them about buying it. They said they had never considered it before.
"A newspaper found us. We didn't go and search out to find the newspaper," Kabat told CBS News.
It was a risky move. Since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have shuttered, according to an annual report published in 2024 by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
Crow is a documentary filmmaker who worked in local news, so the couple knew it would be tough to keep the paper afloat without another source of revenue. That's when they became unlikely restaurateurs.
"We saw an opportunity to engage in the community in a deeper way than we had been, but we also recognized very quickly that we would need to subsidize the newspaper in some sort of way," Crow said.
A large portion of their revenue comes from the coffee shop, restaurant and home goods that they sell, Crow said.
What started as just four employees — the newspaper workers — is now close to 20 across the business, which is one of Marfa's biggest employers, Crow and Kabat said.
While the city of about 2,000 is a tourist destination, its locals — including Presidio County Attorney Blair Park — rely on and support The Sentinel.
"The other news outlets don't, you know, they're not really concerned about what's going on in Marfa," Park told CBS News. "So if it wasn't for this newspaper, we wouldn't be seeing our local, community news anywhere."
