After 157 years of providing local news coverage to the greater Cortland area, the Cortland Standard has printed its final edition. The family owned newspaper has filed for bankruptcy, creating a news desert in a community that learned who was born, who died and what happened in between from, the daily paper.
It was two years after the end of the Civil War when the Cortland Standard printed its first edition, featuring recipes for spring peas, a profile of Civil War generals, a plea against smoking and an ode to a local creek. It printed its last edition this week, citing declining readership and increasing costs. The headline on that last edition, 'Goodbye Cortland, and Godspeed.' Joel Kaplan, a journalism professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Journalism, calls it a sad day.
"Newspapers like that are part of the community, and when they go, I think a piece of the community dies with it," Kaplan said.
Publisher Evan Geibel was part of the fifth generation of the family that bought the paper in 1876. In a letter to readers, he noted the paper was hoping to avoid becoming one of the two newspapers a week in this country that goes out of business by shifting printing out of town, making plans to host community events, and producing more video for their website. But as print readership continued to decline, and advertisers spent their money in online marketing, Geibel wrote he couldn’t afford to publish the paper anymore. Among the cost increases for software and utilities the paper coped with was an expected 25% tariff on newsprint. Kaplan suggests that could have been the final nail in the coffin.
"80 to 90%, I think, of the newsprint that's produced is produced in Canada," Kaplan said. "So, you know, they were just on the edge anyways, and I think this put them over the top. And I don't think they saw a way forward from this."
Kaplan said other communities have risen from news deserts by creating their own publications, sometimes with the help of organizations that provide grants and other support for local journalism. But for now, those folks are used to catching up on local happenings from their trusted afternoon paper.
"Unless you have very civic minded people in that community, you might be out of luck, and all you can do is it goes back to like, you know, the Pony Express days, where you're getting your news from your neighbor or for someone coming by, or letting you know what's going on or from social media," Kaplan said.
The Cortland Standard was the second-oldest family owned newspaper in New York and one of the five oldest family-owned newspapers in the United States.
