End of an era: Grant County Journal will fold final edition after more than a century of local journalism

EPHRATA, Wash. – A legacy newspaper in central Washington is closing this month, leaving another community without a local watchdog.

The Grant County Journal’s final edition will be June 29. It has provided news for Ephrata, the county seat, and nearby Soap Lake since 1907.

“It’s like a death in the family,” said managing editor Randy Bracht. “With the people who read the newspaper, there’s a real sense of loss.”

Ephrata, 20 miles northwest of Moses Lake, has about 8,500 people.

The Journal operates its own press and for many years has printed other newspapers and nickel-saver adverts for surrounding counties.

Those publications have closed, downsized or moved to larger presses. The Journal lost most of its commercial web printing clients in the past 10 years, publisher and owner Jeff Fletcher said.

At its peak, the printing business was so successful that it was able to support four reporters plus one part-time reporter – an outsized newsroom for such a small community.

But those boom days are gone. Operating the press involves a high overhead, and publishing the newspaper by itself is not sustainable.

Until this March, it published twice a week.

Other pressures on the independent newspaper include the usual suspects: Despite a growing population, local advertising has declined as national chains have moved in and locally owned businesses have closed. The larger corporations don’t advertise, Fletcher said.

Classified advertising has largely moved to free websites.

The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, exacerbated these challenges.

Subscribers have declined slightly from the peak, but have remained steady. Including individual sales, the paper has a circulation of about 1,500.

The paper dabbled in digital publication, but it was a lot of extra work and represented about 5% of the readership. Subscribers still preferred a physical copy.

As a final factor, it has been difficult to recruit young reporters to a small rural market and to afford to pay them a living wage.

The Journal’s eight staffers are mostly in their 60s and have worked there for 30 or 40 years.

Pressman Paul Detrick, 63, has been at the Journal since 1988.

“We’ve all been here a really long time and grown together as a family,” Detrick said. “So, to see it end is really sad.”

Detrick started working in press shops when he was 17. He realizes he may never run another press again.

“I can’t say we didn’t see the writing on the wall,” Detrick said. “The newspaper business is shrinking fast.”

Fletcher, 76, started working at the Journal as a press assistant when he was in high school.

He bought a minority interest in the paper in 1977, then became the full owner in 1981.

During his career, he has co-owned stakes in newspapers in Cheney, Davenport, Newport, Ritzville and Spokane Valley.

“I loved every minute of it,” he said.

Fletcher worries about the void that will be left behind. Residents will have to get information on the city council or the school district from their websites.

“Is anybody ever going to question anything? They’re not going to come out with releases that are critical of themselves,” he said.

For the most part, the local government has been fair and responsive to the community, Fletcher said, but there’s no guarantee.

Like any small-town newspaper, the Journal covered the community “cradle to grave,” with births, school sports and activities, obituaries and occasional homicides – “a tremendous variety,” Bracht said.

Fletcher’s daughter, Jennifer DeChenne, who has been the Journal’s business manager for 22 years, said parents who don’t subscribe will come to the office to buy a copy when their child appears in the paper.

“That’s the bittersweet part,” she said, “just the idea that you’re not going to have your refrigerator art anymore.”

The Journal started as the Ephrata Journal, when Grant County was still part of Douglas County.

The original building was refurbished and relocated to the Grant County Museum in Ephrata, where it joins some 30 historic buildings in an open-air town exhibit. Inside, the building displays some of the newspaper’s old typewriters, printing machines and copies of bound volumes.

Fletcher is still figuring out how to preserve the paper’s archives, which are delicate and will need to be stored and handled with care. The archive contains 116 years of history.

People often visit the office for research related to the history of the Columbia Basin Project, he said.

Next month, Ephrata will join a growing number of news deserts across the country.

From 2004 to 2020, the United States lost 2,100 newspapers, according to a report by the University of North Carolina. During that time, at least 1,800 communities lost their only local news outlet.

A newer report by the League of Women Voters of Washington said that from 2004 through April 2022, the number of weekly newspapers in Washington dropped from 116 to 96.

Besides the daily Columbia Basin Herald in Moses Lake, there are three weekly newspapers left in other parts of Grant County.

“I think it’s even worse when you get into counties that are even less populated and don’t have the growth that Grant County has,” Fletcher said. “I don’t know what the answer is going to be.”