Sara Borton
By Justin Jarrett
When Sara Johnson Borton took a job in advertising sales at The Island Packet in 1983, it wasn’t exactly a dream job. She was a young journalist fresh out of college with dreams of writing for a big city newspaper, and the notion of selling ads for a twice-weekly tabloid in a laid-back island atmosphere didn’t quite fit the bill.
Like many young journalists, she figured it was a temporary stop in a transitive profession. Boy, was she wrong. “Life just kind of happened,” said Borton, who retired in December after a 34-year career that included serving as publisher of the Packet since 1993, the Beaufort Gazette since 2001, and The State since 2014.
The newspaper grew with the community. She fell in love with the sports editor, Brett Borton, and put down roots in the Lowcountry’s fertile soil. Before long, leaving was no longer a consideration.
“I have an unbelievably personal connection with the water and the coast,” Borton said. “It’s nourishment. If I’m away for too long, it’s an odd feeling. When you try to explain it to someone who hasn’t lived here it sounds corny, but it’s the truth.” The work was rewarding, too, as Borton oversaw the Packet’s growth into one of the top newspapers of its size in the state – if not the country – and took over publishing the Gazette in 2001.
It also came with its share of challenges, especially with the transition from print to digital in recent years. Borton considers watching the first papers roll off a custom, state-of-the-art printing press in 2007 one of the highlights of her career, but the press was the last the McClatchy Co. would purchase and the Packet and Gazette moved their printing to Columbia in 2015. “Going from being the architects of that press to not printing there eight years later is really symbolic of what our industry has been through,” Borton said. “That was a $45 million facility, and we closed it.”
Borton and her team navigated the industry’s choppy waters as well as anyone in the business, even with the added challenge of operating in a market with a significant senior population that still clings to the printed newspaper. The trick was continuing to devote the necessary resources to the print edition while positioning themselves for the future. “My children will probably never read a print newspaper, I’m sorry to say, but they’re on their phones all the time and they’re newsies,” Borton said. “That’s the challenge. We basically had to keep two businesses alive. … It was challenging but not daunting. I really enjoyed it, quite honestly.”
Nonetheless, she is eager for her next chapter, especially because it means she’ll return to the Lowcountry full-time after spending the bulk of her time in Columbia in recent years. She isn’t sure exactly what she will do next — “I feel like I need to find something purposeful, but I don’t know yet what that is,” she said – but she knows where she will be – the same place she started her newspaper career more than three decades ago.
“The Lowcountry is all about the people,” Borton said. “It’s a community that takes care of each other and it’s a very giving community. When you live here for so long you just assume that every place is like that, but it’s not. I’ve appreciated it more the last four years when I’ve been a part-time resident.”