End of an Era: Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley Advertiser Ceases Weekly Print Edition

Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley Advertiser newspaper, long a maverick in the nation’s media world, is suspending its weekly print edition, choosing to rely only on a daily online version to get the word out.

“We’re old and ailing and no longer able to meet the physical and bureaucratic demands presented by the production of a weekly newspaper,” said Editor Bruce Anderson, 84, in an announcement.

Besides age and ailments, the AVA’s print shutdown is in step with what is going on in the local news industry nationwide. More than 2,600 weekly newspapers have folded across the U.S. in the last 15 years, creating ‘news deserts’ especially in rural regions, according to studies.

Daily newspapers have been hit hard too, with circulation of print editions plummeting. At the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, once the North Coast’s largest newspaper, daily circulation has slid to 20,000 from a high of nearly 100,000 paid subscribers, for example.

“We knew the day would come, and it has,” lamented Editor Anderson about the demise of a weekly newspaper that once sold more copies outside of the county than in.

The AVA for years was scooped up by eager readers in the Bay Area and across the nation, who were taken by the contentious weekly’s no-holds barred coverage of people, places, and events. The AVA’s masthead during that era proclaimed, “Fanning the Flames of Discontent.”

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 Mainstream journalists railed at the AVA’s antics, and publicly questioned whether Editor Anderson, his associate Mark Scaramella, and regular contributors could claim to be “legitimate” journalists. No matter to Anderson, who has owned and published the AVA since 1984. He liked to quote Joseph Pulitzer, the man who established journalism’s most prestigious prize: “Newspapers should have no friends.”

Anderson on Sunday said the AVA has long paid for itself despite a softening circulation from an era when 1,000 or more copies were sold weekly in stores, bookshops, and news racks from Santa Rosa to Eureka, and another 400 or so a week in the Bay Area. In addition, after garnering national attention in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and other urban newspapers, the AVA sold about 500 copies outside of California via mail.

“We even sold a dozen copies every week in Europe to, I suppose, expatriates,” recalled Anderson. “My dear friend the late Alexander Cockburn talked up the AVA wherever he spoke, generating subscriptions along the way,” said Anderson.

Locally, Anderson said the AVA was distributed to ‘every mailbox’ in Anderson Valley, home to about 1,000 people.

Anderson said suspending the weekly print edition was not easy but necessary given recent health concerns, and the demands of newspaper publication.

Anderson said the AVA will cease print production at the end of April.

“But we will live on with our online edition,” said Anderson. 

It is, said the editor, “a severe comedown for all of us who grew up with newspapers.”  

The harsh reality for the print media is that the decline of local news in the U.S. is speeding up despite attention paid to the issue, according to David Bauder of the Associated Press.

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Bauder in a story published Nov. 16, 2023, said the nation has lost one-third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists since 2005.

An average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week in 2023 compared to two a week the previous year, a reflection of an ever-worsening advertising climate, stated a Northwestern University study, according to Bauder. Most are weekly publications, in areas with few or no other sources for news, he wrote.

The outlook is bleak, according to media experts quoted in Bauder’s story.

“My concern is that the acceleration that we’re seeing is only going to worsen,” said Tim Franklin, who heads the local news initiative at Northwestern’s Medill journalism school.

At its current pace, the country will hit 3,000 newspapers closed in two decades sometime next year, with just under 6,000 remaining, the report said. At the same time, 43,000 newspaper journalists lost jobs, most of them at daily publications, with the advertising market collapsing.

Matt LaFever, founder of MendoFever, commented, “Though I too lament the loss of print news, I am optimistic as the news desert blooms with online hyperlocal news outlets like Redheaded Blackbelt, Lost Coast Outpost, and Mendocino Voice.”

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