By: Forrest R. Church
Publisher, The Village Reporter
A letter arrived on my desk from our print press, and it said what these letters always say now: printing your newspaper is about to cost more, again.
Effective with shipments September 1, the price of the paper stock we run every week is going up. I do not envy our print press having to send letters like that one. They know exactly what increases like this do to community newspapers, and I doubt it was easy to write. They did not sugarcoat it, either — this is the sixth time since October of last year that the paper mills have raised the price on them.
Six. Since October.
SIX INCREASES IN TEN MONTHS
Those six increases landed on our print press first, from the mills that supply them. But let’s be realistic about what happens next. A printing company cannot eat six increases from its suppliers in ten months. They have no choice but to pass those expenses along, and the guy standing at the end of that line is the little guy. That would be us, and every other small newspaper printed on that press.
Water runs downhill. It always has.
October to August is roughly ten months. Six increases in that span means a new one every seven weeks or so. Nobody in this chain gets to catch their breath.
I will be honest, my first reaction was not measured or reflective. It was the reaction you have when you already know the answer to a question you are about to ask your bank account.
Here’s the reality. Newsprint mills across North America have been closing, and every closure takes real production out of a market that still needs paper. Fewer mills, same demand. That is a supply-and-demand problem before tariffs even enter the conversation.
And this is not a calm year.
A fresh round of tariffs on Canadian goods took effect August 19, and even the industry’s own trade groups are still sorting out exactly what it touches. Early word is that newsprint itself may be spared. But Canadian mills make the great majority of the newsprint used on this continent, so nobody in this business is breathing easy until we know for sure.
RAZOR-THIN MARGINS, MULTIPLIED
This latest round works out to roughly a seven percent jump in the price of newsprint. On a single sheet of letterhead, seven percent does not sound like much. But newspapers are not printed one at a time.
We print thousands of copies of The Village Reporter every week, often running multiple sections in one edition. That seven percent does not happen once. It repeats itself thousands of times, week after week, before the ink is even dry.
Multiply a small number by a big number often enough and it stops being small.
As I have written before, our profit margins are razor thin in good weeks, and we go well into the red in slower ones. There is no cushion to absorb increases stacking up at this pace. A rounding error for a large corporation is a real threat to small community newspapers like ours.
LIKE GAS PRICES THAT NEVER COME BACK DOWN
The closest thing I can compare this to is the price of gas. We all watch that sign on the corner and grumble when it jumps thirty cents overnight. Ask my wife how many times I have driven past a station just to save a few pennies a gallon.
But here is where the comparison breaks down. Gas comes back down. Paper does not. In ten months I have not once opened a letter telling me newsprint got cheaper. Every one of these increases is permanent.
And speaking of gas, imagine what it costs us. Picture sitting at a gas station in Edon, which is basically Indiana, when a breaking news story goes down in Swanton, which is basically Toledo. That is not a three-minute run to the nearest Dollar General. Williams and Fulton Counties cover a lot of ground, and every board meeting, ballgame, ribbon cutting, and fire scene means somebody from our team putting real miles on a vehicle to get there and back. That is not a figure of speech about our expenses. That is a line item.
THEN THE POST OFFICE PILES ON
If paper were the only expense doing this to us, I could write a shorter, calmer column. It is not.
As I mentioned last fall, the Postal Service has raised its periodical mailing rates six times in recent years, and we absorbed every one. A First-Class Forever stamp tells the same story: fifty-eight cents in 2021, eighty-two cents as of this July. That is a forty-one percent jump in five years on the most ordinary purchase in American life.
Periodicals mail, the class that carries this newspaper to subscribers who still want it in their hands, took an even bigger hit this round: an additional two percent on top of the broader increase. Every class went up. Ours went up more.
I am not writing this to complain about the men and women who deliver your mail. I am writing this because two of our largest, least controllable expenses are climbing at once, for different reasons, and neither asked our permission.
WE ALREADY PLAYED THAT CARD
I can already picture someone reading this and thinking I should quit whining and just raise my prices. Fair enough. But we already did that, in February, and I do not have that card to play again.
That was our first increase since before COVID, and not a decision made lightly. Reviewing the fourth quarter of 2025, exactly one edition covered its own costs through subscription revenue. One. Most weeks we lost a few cents on every copy sold. The choice was cutting news coverage and page count by 25 percent, or adjusting the price. We chose the price, because gutting a quarter of the local coverage in Williams and Fulton Counties was not something I was willing to do.
That increase worked. For the first time in years, a subscription actually finished in the black instead of the red.
Now here is what keeps me up at night. Six paper increases in ten months, a seven percent jump landing September 1, and postage climbing right alongside it are erasing that gain faster than I expected. We are watching a fix we made six months ago get eaten in front of us, and I refuse to hit subscribers again this soon.
That February decision was not easy. One longtime reader told me flat out they could no longer afford it, and that stung more than any letter ever will. But surprisingly, we have not lost many readers over it. Plenty of you said the opposite: about time, you are worth it. That means more than I can put into a column.
THE NEWSROOM TIP JAR
When we made that change in February, we also added something worth mentioning again, because I do not think enough readers know it exists.
We call it a newsroom tip jar. It is entirely voluntary, not part of any subscription, and nobody has to use it. Borrowed from other community newspapers around the country, it lets a reader, a business, or an organization that wants to help do so directly. Every dollar of it goes into newsroom coverage — sending our writers and photographers out into these communities, to the ballgame, to the school board meeting, to the fire department’s anniversary.
We are not asking anyone to do it. But if you have ever wondered how to make sure this newspaper never has to cut coverage to survive a season like this one, that is how.
WE DIDN’T GET A VOTE
Let me be perfectly clear. I am not writing this to ask for sympathy, and I am certainly not asking for a cookie. Running a business means absorbing costs you do not control. I have understood that since the day I took this job.
What frustrates me, and I do mean frustrates, is how little say we have in any of it. A mill somewhere shuts down and our bill goes up. A new trade proclamation gets signed and we hold our breath over what it means for ours. Congress restructures the Postal Service’s finances and our bill goes up. We did not vote on any of it, and every one shows up in an envelope addressed to us.
Do I wish someone would ask a small-town publisher before decisions like that get made? Sure. Does anyone ever? Of course not. This is not about picking a side in a trade fight, left, right, or center. It is about running small, family-owned community newspapers that have already absorbed years of these increases without passing most of them on to you.
Frankly, I am tired of writing variations of this column. But I would rather tell you the truth than pretend everything is fine.
None of that changes what we do next. We will keep watching these costs as closely as we watch the news itself, and we will keep making the hard calls without sacrificing the local coverage you expect from us.
I want every reader to know I am doing everything possible to fight to keep local news flowing at full speed. And did I mention the newsroom tip jar? One hundred percent of it goes into newsroom coverage, sending writers and photographers out to cover your community.
I do not know yet whether the August 19 tariffs touch the newsprint we use (this column was written two weeks ago). What I do know is that our community newspapers trace their roots to the 1870s, and this publisher is closing in on 25 years at this desk. Neither got this far by folding at the sixth price increase in ten months.
I remain optimistic that great days are ahead for our community newspapers, our small Northwest Ohio towns, and our country.
That is it for this week. I’d love to hear from you. As always, feel free to reach out to me at publisher@thevillagereporter.com or via mail at 115 Broad Street, Montpelier, Ohio 43543.