Changes are coming to the paper and county next month

Readers of The Star may notice some changes next month, including weekly full color on some pages and a narrower width of the newspaper, but they come at great cost to Grant County.

The venerable Grant County Journal, the Ephrata newspaper where The Star and The Star Buyers Guide have been printed for decades, will cease publication at the end of June after 116 years of serving that community and promoting community journalism in eastern Washington by backing independent publishers.

The change means we will be printing at the Cheney Free Press starting in July. That will make the logistics of getting the paper back to Grand Coulee and mailing them out on Wednesday morning more challenging for us, but Star readers should notice little difference.

However, they will likely notice our wide width reduced by a third, and the number of pages often increased to still fit the news in. Most papers went to narrower width many years ago.

Readers and advertisers may also notice more full color photos and ads in the paper, made possible by a different press configuration and newer “prepress” technology at Cheney.

The Star will still be here to serve our readers, but come July, Ephrata’s citizens will be without a community paper to highlight their celebrations, follow civic debates, publish their letters of praise or criticism, report on public officials’ leadership, record their children’s academic and athletic triumphs, or publish personality profiles that exemplify the character of, or even just characters in, the community.

No daily newspaper in a distant city can do that. Nor can citizens themselves by simply sharing what they want to on social media, which lacks the central focus that a community newspaper can provide.

At the top of their front page last week, publisher Jeff Fletcher noted, in what was likely the toughest story he ever had to publish, that the Journal will join more than 2,200 newspapers to close since 2005.

Fletcher and his business associates made it possible for both me and the preceding publisher of The Star, Jim Black, to get into this business, financing the purchase with reasonable payments over a long period of time in an effort to keep independent papers out of the hands of conglomerates.

Fletcher’s efforts were at the heart of an expansion of independent papers in the eastern part of the state in 1980s and 1990s. But we are now fewer and farther between, with those left looking for a way to ride the avalanche of a business landscape that exists not just for newspapers but for all forms of media in this era.

Please wish us luck — and subscribe — so we can keep on providing a community forum that exists because you want it to.