Del Norte’s Loss Hits Close to Home

The closure of Del Norte County’s only newspaper after 146 years of service is a painful blow. It’s not merely the end of a business but the loss of a vital civic institution—one that cannot be easily replaced.

As the publisher of Siskiyou News, now a paper of record, this hits close to home. I founded our weekly newspaper because I saw the warning signs. If Gannett deems the Siskiyou Daily News and Mount Shasta Herald unprofitable, we could face the same fate as Del Norte County.

Siskiyou County has already lost newspapers. The Dunsmuir Tribune Weekly, launched in March 1926, is gone. The Pioneer Press of Fort Jones, founded by Gary Mortenson on November 16, 1972, served Scott Valley as the official newspaper of the State of Jefferson until it ceased print publication in 2010. When Daniel Webster, who acquired the Pioneer Press in 1998, transitioned it to digital-only, he built local Facebook news pages to fill the gap.

When Webster retired after years of service, he passed the torch to me—along with those Facebook pages. But I had a different vision: returning to print and reducing reliance on social media for news. How many other local publications have we lost over the decades? Each closure erodes our community’s ability to stay informed about local government, schools, and issues that shape our daily lives.

The two Gannett papers still operating here have been reduced to reprinting USA Today content with minimal local reporting. They’re newspapers in name only. The Mount Shasta Area Newspapers’ Facebook page, which covers the Mount Shasta Herald, Weed Press, and Dunsmuir News, hasn’t posted since October 31, 2024. When these papers inevitably close, what will fill the void?

In Siskiyou County, my best guess is that only half the population regularly uses social media or the internet. When newspapers vanish in rural areas like ours, entire communities lose their primary news source. Local elections go uncovered, city council meetings escape public scrutiny, and community discourse fractures.

That’s why I established Siskiyou News as a grassroots operation focused solely on local coverage—and why we’ve earned paper of record status. Legal notices and government transparency requirements provide stable funding, independent of the volatile advertising market.

Del Norte County’s residents are now grappling with the absence of local government coverage and community news. It’s a stark reminder of what happens when alternatives aren’t built in time.

We cannot let that happen here. Rural communities depend on local journalism to thrive. When corporate publishers abandon us, we must be ready with something authentic—rooted in our community, attuned to our streets, and committed to our stories.

Sometimes the best time to start a newspaper is before you desperately need one.