1st paper in state to close because of the recession

By Cynthia Cather Burton
The Clarke Courier

BERRYVILLE — It is with great sadness that The Clarke Courier says goodbye to its readers today.

Last night, the final edition of The Courier was printed.

The decision to close the 140-year-old weekly, the county’s oldest continuously operated business, was made two weeks ago after months of dismal advertising sales.

Clarke County resident Thomas T. Byrd, publisher of The Winchester Star and president of Winchester Evening Star Inc., bought The Courier last August with the hope of saving his community’s hometown paper.

“Cynthia and her staff did a very good job during the past nine months,” Byrd stated. “As publisher, I am grateful. This is not a happy decision, but one at this date that needs to be made.”

Clarke Courier editor Cynthia Cather Burton checks the paper’s May 21 edition as it comes off the press.     Ginger Perry/Byrd Newspapers

Under the current ownership, The Courier returned to its roots as a community-focused newspaper. Circulation remained steady, but ad revenues declined sharply in the wake of a national recession.

To curb expenses, staff hours were trimmed last fall. In March, The Courier moved from its longtime offices at 16 W. Main St. in Berryville to The Star building at 2 N. Kent St. in Winchester. The efforts did little to help the paper’s bottomline.

Ginger Stanley, executive director of the Glen Allen-based Virginia Press Association, confirmed last week that The Courier is the first paid circulation newspaper in the state to be claimed by the recession.

Stanley says the recession has taken its toll on Virginia’s 125 paid circulation papers and 150-plus free distribution papers. Nearly 400 people have been laid off, and two newspaper groups, the Tidewater-based Tribune Company, publisher of the Daily Press in Newport News, and American Community Newspapers, publisher of Leesburg Today, have filed for bankruptcy, she said.

“This has been very hard for a lot of our members, and we’ve felt their pain tremendously,” said Stanley, whose organization lobbies for newspapers and provides training for journalists.

The upheaval in the newspaper industry has been felt nationwide.

Since January 2008, 120 newspapers across the country have shut down, according to Paper Cuts, a Web site that tracks the newspaper industry. More than 21,000 jobs at 67 newspapers have vaporized in that time, according to the site.

Stanley is hopeful that the worst of the financial fallout is over.

“We’re starting to come out of it, gently,” she said. “Papers that have been able to weather this perfect storm are going to survive.”

But change is inevitable as newspapers grapple with how to make print and online products profitable.

Stanley predicts that the shift to online editions will continue as newspapers reduce the scope and size of print editions.

The free online content that many newspaper readers now enjoy may soon cost money to access.

“I believe we have to charge for our content,” Stanley said.

Though no one has developed the perfect business model yet, Stanley is confident that the newspaper industry will become profitable again.

“Let’s face it, we are a necessary commodity,” Stanley said. “Without community newspapers, citizens are not informed to the degree that they need to be informed.”

‘The end of an era’

The Courier was a little paper.

Out of 104 non-daily newspapers in the state, its ranked 92nd with a circulation of 2,240, according to 2009 VPA data.

Readership was small but loyal.

“My whole family loved The Courier,” said Clarke County resident Gail Good, whose father, Willliam Rhoden, worked as a freelance photographer for the paper for many years. “It has been a big part of this community for such a long time. It makes me feel sad. This truly is the end of an era.”

The Courier’s legacy began on Feb. 19, 1869, when William N. Nelson, a captain in the Confederate army during the Civil War, printed the paper’s first edition.

Over the next 140 years, The Courier had 10 publishers. Just when the paper was about to fail, “someone would come along and rescue it,” said Val Van Meter, who worked at The Courier for 18 years, starting in 1982 as a reporter and becoming editor in 1985.

The Courier even survived the Great Depression.

“Considering this paper’s really long history and that it made it through some other really hard times, it’s particularly sad that it isn’t going to be able to make it through this one,” said Van Meter, who now covers Clarke County for The Winchester Star.

No one had a longer association with The Courier than G. Kenneth Levi. He became editor in 1932 — the youngest newspaper editor in Virginia at the time — and served as publisher from 1952 to 1981. His sons Dean and Chris also worked at the paper, and his wife, Evelyn, wrote a column. All are now deceased.

Former Courier reporter Kim Lewis, a self-described northerner, was hired by Levi in 1978 straight out of college. She remembers her boss as the “quintessential Southern gentleman . . . who typed super-fast with two fingers on a manual typewriter.”

For many years, The Courier office was on Berryville’s Buckmarsh Street. The printing press was in the back of the building.

“The place always smelled like ink,” Lewis recalled.

She also remembers the dreaded weekly push to get the paper ready for Wednesday’s press time.

“God knows, you never stopped typing on Mondays or Tuesdays,” Lewis said, laughing.

Lewis, who still lives in Clarke County, left the paper in 1983 and is now a college professor.

Looking back, she said there was something “kind of delightful” about The Courier’s news coverage.

“It was mostly all about who was getting married and who died and who did us proud,” Lewis said. “You could always count on your kid’s picture being in the paper if he or she did anything. There was always lots of room for little kids’ pictures. There was something incredibly sweet about giving column inches to things like a 2 year old getting his first haircut.”

Women in the community were paid by the column inch to write society news.

“So we often had a lot of social events,” Lewis said with amusement. “Yeah, we covered everything.”

There was plenty of “real” news, too.

On Nov. 30, 1974, a Trans World Airlines jet slammed into the Blue Ridge Mountains at the Clarke County-Loudoun County line, killing all 92 people on board. Chris Levi wrote the articles for The Courier and took the photos.

During her stint as editor, Van Meter joked that it was “terribly difficult for three people in Clarke County to get together without someone from The Courier showing up to take their picture.”

Back then, the county’s population was about 12,000 — it’s now about 14,500 — and Van Meter’s goal was to get everyone’s name in the paper.

“Some of them ended up on the police blotter, but that was the plan,” she said with a smile.

Van Meter noted that news in Clarke County tends to have recurring themes.

“And recurring people,” quipped Lewis.

News from past years published in The Courier’s weekly “From the Attic” column shows that the fight in the 1980s to build a new county high school is not unlike the fight currently taking place to build that school’s replacement.

Without The Courier, “there will be a whole lot less local news floating through the community,” Van Meter lamented.

“The community is losing its voice,” she said.

No, The Courier wasn’t perfect.

Pam Lettie, who was editor from May 2004 to July 2007, said resources were limited, which often made putting together the paper a challenge.

Typos were sometimes plentiful.

“Even with all those warts and blemishes, The Courier has served an important purpose, and I’m sad,” Lettie said.

Today, The Courier becomes part of the history that it has been chronicling since 1869.

“I hate to see it go,” Van Meter said.

We do, too.

After 140 years, it’s time to stop the presses.

— Contact Cynthia Cather Burton
at cburton@clarkecourier.com