North Bay’s smallest newspapers struggling to survive
The March 31 edition of The Weekly Calistogan included a write-up of the All-Napa County high school football team, a preview of the oyster bar coming to the Calistoga Depot, a long poem called “Memories of the Old Kitchen” and a story titled “Snakes of India.”
Those last two offerings were part of a reproduction of the newspaper’s Dec. 26, 1877, front page — the first print edition of the Independent Calistogian, as it was originally called, honored in the final print edition of The Weekly Calistogan.
After more than 150 years of rolling off the presses, the Calistogan has joined hundreds of other small papers that now exist only on the internet.
“It makes me sad,” Pat Hampton said. “I worked there for 10 years. I mean, I really loved that paper and I loved its history. But the newspaper’s only as good as the people who own it.”
Hampton has a complicated relationship to The Weekly Calistogan. She was its editor for a decade, split into two terms, mostly in the 1990s. And since 2002, she has been its primary competitor as publisher of the Calistoga Tribune, a weekly with about 875 subscribers.
Hampton hopes the Tribune — which she creates, along with editor Kim Beltran, in a small suite, barely visible from the street, across a driveway from the Calistoga Post Office — isn’t the next to go. She is 72. She has survived cancer and tamed Parkinson’s disease, and she can’t put out a newspaper forever.
Sharon Stensaas is in a similar position. Stensaas, 73, founded the free weekly Yountville Sun in 1998, just a couple months after she and her husband moved to the small Napa Valley town, which at that time had only begun its emergence as a luxury destination.
“I call it my baby,” Stensaas said of the Sun. “Well, the baby is 24 years old now, and it needs to move in with somebody else. I don’t want to send it off with a stranger, but if I have to, I have to.”
It’s a precarious moment for the North Bay’s smallest newspapers. The Windsor Times, Cloverdale Reveille, Sonoma West Times & News, Russian River Times, Clearlake Observer American and Middletown Times Star, among others, have either ceased print operations or gone out of business entirely in the past couple decades.
The Healdsburg Tribune, which has printed since 1888 (first as the Sonoma County Tribune), recently announced that it, too, was going online-only — before the publishing group Weeklys swooped in at the last moment to forestall its ink-and-paper demise.
This trend is playing out all over the country.
Between 1996 and 2015, the Brookings Institute charted 296 newspaper exits across the country. And it has only gotten more dire during the pandemic. Between March 2020 and August 2021, the Poynter Institute found, 85 local newsrooms were permanently shut.
Attention has tended to focus on the larger closings, like the Rocky Mountain News in 2009, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (which stopped printing that same year but remained online) and the Tampa Tribune in 2016. Those were traumatic events in major media markets. But the deeper problem may be smaller publications going extinct.
And that’s not simply the view of the journalists who have a stake in the outcome.
In 2018, Brookings — a nonprofit public policy organization — analyzed municipal bond rates in communities that lost their local papers. Researchers found that in the first three years after a closure, city borrowing costs increased by 5-11 points, depending on the type of bond issued. On average, municipalities suddenly without local coverage paid an extra $650,000 per bond issue.
“Overall, our results indicate that local newspapers hold their governments accountable, keeping municipal borrowing costs low and ultimately saving local taxpayers money,” the Brookings authors wrote.
But the realities of modern news present a steep uphill battle for small publications. Many consumers turn to larger websites or news aggregators these days — and so do advertisers, wiping out a money stream that small publishers haven’t found a way to replace.
Of America’s 3,143 counties, about 2,000 now go without a daily newspaper, and 200 have no local paper at all, according to an analysis by University of North Carolina researchers.
“Residents in these news deserts tend to be older, poorer and less educated than the overall population,” they wrote.
No corner of Wine Country could accurately be called a news desert. Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Lake counties all have daily papers. (Or thereabouts — the Lake County Record-Bee prints five days a week, the Ukiah Daily Journal six.) But no one covers the tedious, vital mechanisms of hyperlocal government like a newsroom based in town.
