Bob CollinsThe The Raymond/Prinsburg News has published its weekly edition in Kandiyohi County for 6,124 consecutive weeks. That streak is now over. The paper that was founded in November 1900 is no more, the West Central Tribune says.
The newspaper business is plenty hard, harder still when it services one town of 764 (Raymond, Minn.) and another of 497 (Prinsburg, Minn.)
But the paper has another streak. It hasn’t made money since Ted and Kari Jo Almen bought it 20 years ago. Sometimes, there was enough local advertising to break even, but in a front page column announcing the decision, the Almen’s said it’s not fair to take money from their other papers — the Clara City Herald and Kerkhoven Banner — to subsidize the information needs of Raymond and Prinsburg.
Still, 400 subscriptions in a combined market of about 1,200 people isn’t nothing, but there aren’t that many local businesses anymore to buy the advertising.
What happens to the people who paid for those subscriptions? They’ll get the Clara City Herald instead.
The News was one Minnesota’s smallest weekly newspapers.
It did have a website. But it hasn’t been updated since 2013 as more information was sent to its Facebook account instead.
