The Last Edition

WARROAD, Minn. — Whenever she thought her small staff would be facing a particularly stressful deadline day, Rebecca Colden, the publisher of the weekly Warroad Pioneer, declared a Bloody Mary Monday.

This was definitely one of those Mondays — indeed, the last of them. The Pioneer, the newspaper that had served this tiny town just below the Canadian border for 121 years, was one issue away from certain death.

When Ms. Colden woke up that day, she listened to a contemporary Christian song that had buoyed her spirit of late: “This is my story, this is my song/Praising my savior all day long.” Now she was trudging into the newsroom on a cold May morning with vodka, olives and tomato mix. A mock-up of the front page greeted her on the newsroom printer, screaming out a bold, striking headline: FINAL EDITION. She sat at a desk and opened some bills, one of them stamped “past due.”

With the distribution of its final issue on May 7, The Warroad Pioneer, which printed about 1,100 copies per week, joined roughly 2,000 newspapers that have closed in the United States over the last 15 years, according to a study by University of North Carolina researchers soberly titled “The Expanding News Desert.” Today in many American communities, the researchers noted, “there is simply not enough digital or print revenue to pay for the public service journalism that local newspapers have historically provided.”

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