It’s been more than a year since the Traer Star-Clipper office closed.
When the owner of the paper relocated everyone working on a Tama-Grundy Publishing weekly to Tama, seven publications total, everything was left behind. Look in the front window and, aside from the clock that stopped sometime in the fall, it appears someone should walk through the door at any minute.
The racked weeklies from early 2018, now yellowing, still there.
A handful of Centennial Editions from 1973, potentially unmoved since that year, still there.
Most worrisome, the bound volumes, potentially the only physical copies of decades’ worth of both the Star-Clipper and Dysart Reporter, might or might not still be there. Despite multiple offers to find them a new home, their whereabouts are unconfirmed. There are plans to digitize the papers through around World War II, but I really hope we can get them all. There are two file cabinets of card catalogs painstakingly listing references to every person, place, and event, lines typewritten in one at a time over decades. The fate of this invaluable resource of Tama County history, too, is in question.
The owners didn’t even take the shingle down to give to the museum.
The Star-Clipper editor’s time is divided with one other paper. That’s better than some weeklies to the south.
As of earlier this year, four newspapers — which used to be more — in Iowa, Poweshiek, and southern Benton counties are all in the hands of one “community content specialist” from her home in Homestead. The papers are technically subsidiaries of Gannett, bought by The Des Moines Register in 2000. Editors of other publications in the group took a different job and early retirement since last summer.
But they are, at least, still being published.
UPDATE 5/31: The Star-Clipper shingle has been taken down. Everything else remains inside, untouched.