A citizen reporter strayed onto a police gun range. Cops sought a warrant for his online newspaper.

Jarom Smith, publisher of a local digital news outlet, stands outside the gate to a police shooting range on Nov. 25, 2025, in Emporia. Authorities obtained a search warrant for his publication’s Facebook account to search for evidence of criminal trespass after he took photos at the location a month earlier. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

The trouble started one wet Friday morning in late October when Jarom Smith walked past a weathered red gate in a brushy area near the southwest corner of the Emporia city limits. Smith, a citizen journalist, wanted a couple of photos of the old police shooting range inside to post for his readers.

“I simply walked around the gate,” Smith recalls. “I didn’t open anything. I didn’t climb anything. I didn’t have to.”

Smith says he didn’t notice a sign saying the area is for law enforcement only.

We’re standing on the dirt lane outside the open gate, two days before Thanksgiving. As we speak, Smith is being investigated for criminal trespass and authorities have obtained a search warrant for the Facebook account of his digital newspaper, the Lyon County Observer. It seeks “all records” from three days in October.

There are no officers inside practicing, no sharp reports cracking the November air, just a few city workers. They appear to be moving dirt or preparing to. There’s a bulldozer idling on the shoulder of the road behind us. We’re a few hundred yards away from the city transfer station, which before the days of recycling and waste management would be called the city dump.

There’s a “Dead End” sign near the red gate to the shooting range, but the warning sign is behind us and to one side of a low-water bridge maybe 25 yards away. I don’t spot it myself until Smith points a finger at it.

Suddenly the bulldozer comes roaring up behind us and passes close as it goes through the gate. A few minutes later, the transfer station supervisor comes up in a white city truck. The supervisor, a guy named Tim in a dark ball cap and a safety-green shirt, is visibly irritated.

He says the area is posted. I say we’re on public property.

“We’ve already run this guy off twice,” the supervisor says, indicating Smith with a tilt of his head.

Then he steps on the gas and briskly enters the off-limits area.

On Oct. 24, Smith posted the images of the range to the Observer’s Facebook account and then forgot about them. He was surprised when he got a phone call from an investigator with the Emporia Police Department a couple of weeks later saying he was investigating a criminal trespass complaint at the joint city-county shooting range.

“He asked me if I had stepped onto it,” Smith recalls. “I told him I took two photographs and left, and that I didn’t notice any ‘No Trespassing’ sign. He said there was.”

On Nov. 16, he was notified by Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, that the company had received a search warrant for the Observer’s account. When Smith said he didn’t know what the warrant could be about, Meta sent him a copy of the warrant. On its “Information for Law Enforcement” page, the company says it may be compelled, upon receipt of a warrant showing probable cause, to disclose “the stored contents of any account, which may include messages, photos, videos, timeline posts, and location information.” While friends and family chats are now end-to-end encrypted, according to Meta, Smith said he doesn’t believe the same protection applies to business chats.

Signed Nov. 14 by a Lyon County judge, the warrant did not identify the crime being investigated, but it said evidence had been given under oath to find probable cause that an offense had been committed. The warrant sought “all records” for the account from Oct. 23 to Oct. 25.

Meta said Smith had 10 days in which to challenge the warrant or it would release the information. Smith didn’t know what to do. He was afraid he might go to jail through an honest mistake, and he worried about the hundreds of readers who had sent him news tips and other confidential information through the Observer’s account. How could he protect his sources if the police had access to all that information?

It might, Smith feared, be the end of the Observer, a digital upstart on a shoestring budget.

Smith, 41, posts nearly every day. He covers government meetings, publishes crime reports and runs interviews with candidates for local elections. He lives in Olpe, about 14 miles south of Emporia. The Observer has 5,000 followers, and Smith gives them the news with a twist. He’s not afraid to voice his opinion, and that has made him a polarizing figure in this struggling college town of 24,000.

“I really want to see Emporia become a bigger town,” he said, “a stronger town and a more free town. And everything I’m doing is towards that goal.”

Smith defines “more free” as being more transparent, and he believes spending millions on a new shooting range and emergency dispatch center are symptoms of government obfuscation. In one post, he accused a county official of lying about the true cost of the project.

“I don’t think I’m going to stop it from being built,” Smith said, “but it’s time that people speak out and not be afraid.”

It’s a troubling thing for democracy when any news outlet receives a search warrant, and alarming when the warrant is a clear abuse of power. In 2023, the Marion County Record made international news when its newsroom, and the home of its publisher, were targets of a police raid looking for evidence of a nonexistent crime. Authorities improperly seized computers, cellphones, and records. The stress of the raid may have contributed to the death of 98-year-old Joan Meyer, co-owner of the newspaper. The Marion raid, the most brazen example of a challenge to press freedom in recent American memory, has resulted in lawsuits being settled with the paper’s management, its reporters and others in the millions of dollars.

Reporters exercising their First Amendment right to gather news are supposed to be protected by an array of state and federal laws.

“The federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980 sharply limits whether law enforcement can use search warrants against journalists,” David Greene, a senior staff attorney and civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. “The search warrant (in the Lyon County Observer) case would seem to be so overly broad that it would violate the PPA.”

Greene’s foundation is a San Francisco nonprofit devoted to protecting digital privacy, defending free speech, and promoting internet civil liberties. He said he didn’t think the Kansas Reporter’s Shield Law applied in this case, because the warrant sought material from Meta and not the journalist. While subpoenas for information are fairly common, Greene said, search warrants are less so.

“What the Privacy Protection Act is really saying is use a subpoena,” he said.

A subpoena allows a challenge before authorities can seize documents and equipment. There are exceptions, of course, such as when national security is at risk or a person’s life is in danger. It also does not give journalists carte blanche to commit crimes, although it is unlikely that mistakenly setting foot on a prohibited property would be worth more than a warning in most jurisdictions.

Greene pointed out that the act actually doesn’t identify “journalists” in its language but instead defines the protected material as that gathered with the intent to disseminate to the public.

“Everyone who has social media or uses online services (to reach the public) is covered,” Greene said. “So that doesn’t require someone to be a professional journalist.”

Smith said he considers himself a journalist, although many in the community don’t. Reporters from some legacy media outlets will move across the room to be away from him when he covers meetings. Some officials have taken issue with the accuracy of his reporting, and Smith acknowledges that he is still learning but tries to correct any mistakes quickly.

Smith is a largely self-taught journalist. He graduated from Emporia State University with a BA in political science in 2018, but makes his living as a contractor painting homes and businesses. He spends 10 to 15 hours a week gathering news, maintaining the Facebook account and updating the Observer’s dedicated platform called ShareThere. He says the Observer doesn’t yet make any money, and that his income from the contracting business subsidizes the digital publishing venture. He doesn’t have a fancy camera, so he relies on his phone for just about everything, and he often excuses himself to take a call. It’s important, he said, that he answers when the phone buzzes.

Hundreds of people have contacted him through the Observer’s Facebook account with confidential news tips and other information. In the past 90 days alone, he said, after checking his phone, he’s had 141 conversations with readers.

“Sometimes it’s just people saying hey, I like what you wrote,” Smith said. “Sometimes it’s somebody saying, ‘I’ve got a story for you.’ In the past couple of days I’ve had people who want to meet with me. I don’t write about every story that people ask me to, but I guess I’ve become known to cover things that others don’t.”

He files Kansas Open Records Act requests, attends lots of meetings, and asks many questions. Name an entity in Lyon County — the city commission, county officials, the local hospital — and they have likely been stung by Smith’s opinion. Local officials often find him irksome, some told me confidentially, but others said they had a growing respect for his plainspoken tenacity. His pieces aren’t as polished as those of veteran reporters, but he is building a dedicated audience through aggressive reporting and sharp point of view.

“Emporia’s economy has taken hit after hit — Tyson gone, Holiday Resort closed, Morgan Advanced Materials shuttered — yet the Regional Development Association continues drifting without leadership, purpose, or result,” he wrote in one recent post.

In another:

“On Tuesday, three new (city) commissioners were elected, backed by the same circle of old-money power brokers that have steered this town for decades.”

And, back in April 2025, this commentary about the county’s purchase of land to build a new law enforcement shooting range and 911 communications center at a cost of $2 million:

“For what purpose was this tract of land bought?” Smith asked. “A shooting range. Not a public one for you and me, but for the sheriff’s department. Never mind the fact that they already have one about 300 yards away from the new site. Never mind the fact that there is an additional one a few miles north of town off of the turnpike.”

The price of the project, according to local reports, has now risen to more than $5 million. At least $1 million — including a $250,000 federal grant — has already been approved for the gun range. I emailed Lyon County Commission Chair Ken Duft for comment on the project and Smith’s criticism. Duft did not respond to the request.

While I seldom agree with Smith because our politics are so different — until recently he called the Observer the Lyon County Conservative — I find him an easy man to talk to, somebody who appears sincere in his beliefs. When he sits for an interview, he is freshly showered and wearing clean clothes but still has paint — a dark, institutional brown — from the day’s contracting job clinging to his hands.

When some readers complained that he called out others for misbehavior but was ignoring his own past, he posted his own mugshot from years ago, when he was booked for a misdemeanor. Smith said the offense was later expunged. In 2020 and 2024, he ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for county commissioner, coming in third both times.

Like others with connections to legacy media, I was irritated at how Smith began his digital newspaper. It’s not the way I would have done it, I tsk-tsked to myself. But now I realize that is the point of the Observer, because it’s a publication made not for me but for a different audience. It’s an alternative. And anybody who says he’s not gaining needed journalism skills isn’t paying attention.

But the quality of Smith’s reporting is not a factor when it comes to the search warrant. What does matter is the chilling effect on free speech that occurs when investigators seek warrants to access the social media accounts of those who inform the public.

That Smith was the target of a search warrant from officials who should have known better, especially since the Marion raid, is inexcusable. A literal misstep should not be subject to the full force of investigative discovery. What did investigators hope to gain from the Observer’s social media account? Smith had already shared with them the photos he took and admitted to straying into an area where he didn’t have permission. And the county prosecutor, according to Smith, said she hadn’t even seen the search warrant until it was posted on the Observer’s Facebook account.

Since Nov. 25, Smith has been represented by Max Kautsch, a Lawrence attorney specializing in media law who has also contributed columns to Kansas Reflector. Kautsch declined comment. Smith, however, told me a second, narrower search warrant was in the works for the Observer’s account.

I contacted the county prosecutor, Amy Aranda, and asked her about the case. What crime was being investigated? What local code or state statute did investigators suspect of being broken? What did the second search warrant hope to uncover?

“I cannot comment on an ongoing criminal investigation,” Aranda told me in an email, “except to state it is my understanding that a search warrant was withdrawn, no records were produced, and a second search warrant will not be served relating to the matter you’re inquiring about.”

When I described the email to Greene, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, he chuckled.

“Well good for them,” he said. “They did the right thing.”

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.