Small-Town Newspapers Are Dying Because No One Wants to Run Them

For more than a century, the McClusky Gazette has reported the news in a small town in the middle of North Dakota. But if Allan Tinker, the newspaper’s eighty-three-year-old owner and publisher, can’t find someone to take over by next spring, she plans to close its doors for good. “I just can’t assume the responsibility anymore,” Tinker said. “I’ve got to look at my health and my life—what’s left of it.” 

The American local news industry has been in free fall for years, with more than a third of the country’s print newspapers having shuttered over the past two decades, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. But unlike many of those papers, the Gazette isn’t struggling to stay afloat. It has about 330 print subscribers—roughly equal to the number of residents in town. “I will close it because of my age and health,” Tinker said—and because there’s no one else to take it on.

In eastern Oregon, the veteran journalist Les Zaitz faced a similar dilemma last year when he sought to sell his 115-year-old newspaper, the Malheur Enterprise. Zaitz tried to find a buyer because, at sixty-nine, he wanted to retire—but with no one stepping up, he eventually gave up and closed the paper in May. The Enterprise was profitable, with a robust advertising and subscription business, Zaitz said. “Finances had zero to do with the decision.”

And in northwestern Oklahoma, Sheila Blankenship made the painful decision to close the 120-year-old Hooker Advance last year, after she failed to find a buyer. “It would have killed me” to keep running it, Blankenship said. People continued to subscribe until the newspaper’s final months.

Small-town newspapers shutting down due to the lack of a succession plan is a growing problem in nearly a dozen states, according to a tally by CJR and a number of statewide press associations. In Colorado, the Range Ledger closed in 2022 when the owner died; South Dakota’s Wilmot Enterprise stopped publishing after its owner got sick in 2024; eight weekly newspapers in northeastern North Dakota closed in 2023 when their eighty-eight-year-old owner wanted to retire. Newspapers in other states, including the Genoa Times Leader in Nebraska, the Eagle Democrat in Arkansas, and the Galena Sentinel Times in Kansas, have come close to those fates, but managed to find buyers before it was too late. “I am always concerned about having a pool of buyers ready and willing to step in,” says Emily Bradbury, executive director of the Kansas Press Association.