A tip from a reader led to this bombshell printed in the Eagle Grove Eagle: Nineteen Iowa weekly newspapers are at immediate risk of closing. Their owner, Mid-America Publishing, sent a message to employees that the company “will shut down after years of financial strain driven by a deteriorating business climate and rising costs.”
“We regret to inform you that Mid-America Publishing will be ceasing all operations,” company president Matthew Grohe said in the statement published in the Eagle. “This is a sad day for us and for everyone.” The company’s final day will be April 2, according to the article, which also says that will be the Eagle’s last print day unless a buyer is found.
Seven county seats — not counting Forest City, although the Buffalo Center Tribune relocated there just last year — will lose their newspapers. At least six counties will be down to one newspaper, often on the periphery of the county, and Ida County is on track to become the first in Iowa without a print newspaper. Just last year, a study from Northwestern University found that Iowa was by far the largest state, county-wise, to have a paper in every county.
Dozens of Iowa towns that made Mid-America newspapers their official newspapers will lose that outlet. So will school districts. The Iowa House Local Government Committee a few weeks ago advanced a bill that initially was going to remove all requirements for publishing public notices in newspapers, but that section was removed by the time it got to the House floor. I fear that if Mid-America goes under and the papers aren’t bought, that bill could have less opposition the next time around.
Some of the Mid-America newspapers’ websites had become sporadic in posting stories online. For example, the Eldora Newspapers website is only up-to-date on obits and the e-edition scroll, while all news and sports stop in fall 2025. A few papers were migrated to subdomains under midamerica.news.
In addition to communities losing a reliable source of news, they and we are at risk of losing reliable sources of the past: the newspaper online archives, which will only be fractionally available and only as long as the domain names hold out (How do you go behind the paywall of a defunct publication?), and the bound volumes, which in the case of the Eagle and Wright County Monitor are waiting in a now-shuttered office to be bought “for a reasonable cost.”
(So I can put emojis in headlines. Interesting.)