The monthly newspaper in Mount Enterprise  doesn’t report the news. It shouts it.

“CRACK METH & CRIME” cries the November front page of The Texan. “What are WE doing about it?”

Inside is a story bemoaning drug problems in the Rusk County town of 540. In the story, Texan owner Brandi Jo Newman describes a wild scene that must have been the talk of the town. She doesn’t tread lightly.

“(A Mount Enterprise resident) supposedly takes too much Nyquil one night, walks through town with no shirt, harasses George by grabbing and shaking him and yelling “give me your knife you [expletive] Mexican. I know you have one” inside Chappy’s, pours a pot of coffee down the front of his face (it was cold coffee), takes Olivia Thorn’s cigarettes, steals two bottles of vinegar, runs out behind the clinic, chunks the vinegar bottles at our so-called City Marshall, then turns and runs at Brandi Jo Newman (and he didn’t want any of that), is almost run over by Gayle Risinger in front of the bank, beats on the back door of Nick Jones’ grandmother’s home, does a handstand in front of Becky Barker’s salon, runs into the tall grass behind her salon, busts open the back door of Terry Lee’s home, yells at her ‘where is my brother,’ pursues her out the front door, she screams her head off for help, is found in the backyard of Brandon Jones’ home with a gun pointed at him, he runs out in the woods towards Tony Gresham’s home, thirty minutes later he is seen running through Tracy Perry’s front yard back toward town and shows up at work (in Rusk County) the next morning like nothing happened.”

Judging from that long paragraph, Newman intimately knows her town and its inhabitants, but that doesn’t stop her from ruffling a few feathers. She goes on to further insult the town’s city marshal of nearly two decades, saying his critics call him a “glorified ticket giver.”

In large display type in the middle of the page, Newman writes, “And while we try to figure out what to do another CRACK head has scored a bump with my flat screen t.v.!”

This is not what you expect to read in a viable, two-year-old newspaper in a small rural town. Who is this woman, and why is she shouting?

At her downtown office between a beauty salon and a barber shop, Newman said she launched The Texan in December 2007 after moving home to be with her father, who was dying of cancer.

“It was a way for me to get to know my community,” she said. “I just randomly put it together. Nobody knew I was doing it. I just started putting them out, and people were like, cool.”

Newman’s day job is financial planning. She is tall, a former professional golfer in her mid-30s, and she wears cowboy boots and a ponytail pulled through her baseball cap. Some of the town’s residents grumble she’s an “outsider” and a “pot stirrer,” but she said she doesn’t mind.

Since Newman lives outside the city limits, she can’t run for office, and she said this is her way to make a difference in the community.

“There are things going on in Mount Enterprise that I have heard about and that I have personally witnessed that impede progress,” she said.

“I think that sometimes people should stand up and say something. I don’t want to print anything damaging to anybody, but people just need to be held accountable. I just think somebody should do it.”

Plenty of people think she’s going about it all wrong, according to David Collins, the city marshal. He said she exaggerates Mount Enterprise ‘s drug problems, which are no worse than any small town’s.

“It’s a quiet, peaceful, tight-knit little community,” he said.

“Basically, a senior citizen town, just easy-going and laid-back. Then you get somebody like Brandi who is used to excitement and things going on, and you can stir things up real easy. It don’t take much to get things bent all out of shape.

“When you get someone new coming in who don’t know what they’re talking about and just start printing things, it could get out of hand, so to say.”

Collins said he hasn’t bothered to refute Newman’s claim that he’s not doing his job.

“It’s free speech, and she’s got a right to say what she wants to and tell her side of the story, and everybody else knows my side of the story, so it’s not even worth mentioning,” he said.

The Texan has plenty of advertisers, and Newman claims her profits more than pay for printing costs and one full-time assistant. In addition to the community news, she fills the pages of The Texan with columns about gun rights and other issues that strike a chord with conservative Texans.

In September, she expanded her circulation to all of Rusk County and part of Panola County. Plans include two additional editions of The Texan in Central Texas, eventually expanding statewide.

Collins said he has advised Newman to “tell it like it is.” He said he hopes her endeavor will succeed.

“I just know she started out on a bad foot,” he said. “Only time will tell where to go from here. You have to allow anybody time to see what happens.”