Wednesday is deadline day at the Navajo Times, and at the weekly newspaper’s headquarters in the Navajo Nation capital of Window Rock, Olivia Benally is taking a break from answering emails and training new hires to talk about the position she started in May. “It’s been humbling,” she says. “This is a new era for me.”
Benally has always been good with numbers, and that proficiency has led to a successful accounting career and a two-decade stint at the Times. But she says she never imagined she’d become the first female publisher and CEO in the 62-year-old newspaper’s history. “It was not even on my radar,” she says. “I was comfortable in the background, and I thought I’d reach my 20-year mark and then maybe do something different. Well, this is something different.”
Benally was born and raised in Kinlichee, a tiny community near Ganado. Like many Navajo families, hers was a single-parent household, and she says her mother’s strength while living from paycheck to paycheck instilled her own work ethic and informed her career path. After graduating from Window Rock High School, she attended the University of New Mexico-Gallup before finishing her degree in Oklahoma.
Next came professional experience at private companies in the Sooner State. “I was basically the underdog, doing things the accountants should have been doing,” she says. “That was an eye-opener for me — that I could do the hands-on things. The only difference was the pay.” It gave her confidence, she says, that she could handle a more senior role.
All the while, though, something was calling her home. “In our tradition and our culture, you make a full circle,” she says. “I wanted to be closer to my mom and my siblings, and I wanted my kids to know their roots are here.” The family returned to Navajoland in the early 2000s, and Benally applied for a senior accountant position at the Times, thinking it would be a change of pace. She was more right than she realized. “It was a whole new world,” she recalls.
“I knew nothing of publishing — the terminology, the editorial aspects. I just knew numbers.”
But while she learned, she thrived, advancing to the role of controller, then finance director. And as she raised a son and a daughter, Benally embraced the single-parent role her mother had modeled. “As Navajo women, we’ve always been told in our culture that we’re the forefront and foundation of our families,” she says. “There’s no room for failure. We must get it done, no matter what. Watching my mother struggle, and the challenges and heartbreaks along the way, really instilled in me what I wanted to bring forth for my children.”
That determination paid off. After Tom Arviso Jr., the Times’ publisher and CEO since 2004, announced his impending retirement in early 2022, the paper’s board approved Benally as his successor. “Her background is in finance, but along the way, she learned the journalism side and the publishing side,” says Arviso, who spent more than 37 years at the Times. “She’s a very intelligent person, and she picked up a lot of the different things that go into publishing a newspaper.”
That wasn’t the only reason for the succession plan, though. “She’s an honest person and a caring person,” Arviso says. “They always say you don’t want to get too close to your employees, but I really didn’t believe that. Our company is small, but the job we do, and the responsibility we have to our community and our readers, is huge. I always thought it was important to get to know who my employees were, who their families and children were. Olivia really does follow that philosophy.”
Benally’s accounting background is likely to come in handy in the years ahead. The Times’ print circulation was over 24,000 when she started working there; today, it’s about half that. And even in the digital age and a time of rising printing costs, infrastructure challenges and lack of internet access on the Navajo Nation make the weekly printed newspaper a vital source of information. Additionally, many print subscribers are older, and “a lot of those people still enjoy having the paper between their fingers and feeling it,” Benally says. “That’s our service to the people, and we have to keep that going as long as we can.”
At the same time, the younger generation among the paper’s 30 full-time staff is focused on embracing online publishing and exploring video production as another revenue source. And while Benally is the first woman in the Times’ top job, she’s also part of a trend: The paper’s editor, human resources director and circulation manager are all women, too. “I’m really proud that I had something to do with [choosing a woman],” Arviso says, “but I’m even more proud that Olivia was the person we selected, and I know she will continue to make all of us proud.”
Benally’s children are grown now and thriving, and when she isn’t answering emails or navigating deadlines, she’s rooting for the Dallas Cowboys or going for a hike or a cruise on her bicycle. No longer “in the background,” she’s adjusting to her role as the face of the country’s largest tribally owned and operated newspaper company. But she’s staying humble.
“I have a lot of support, not just from my staff here but also from peers outside [the paper],” she says. “We take pride in what we do here. And we’re going to continue telling our people’s stories, hopefully for generations to come.”
WINDOW ROCK Navajo Times, navajotimes.com