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.