Thoughts on the Webb City Sentinel's final issue and the end of an era

When I saw that the upcoming issue of the Webb City Sentinel would be its last, my thought went back to the first newspaper I put out of business.

It was 41 years and two months ago.

I wasn't the one who made the decision to close the Lockwood Luminary-Golden City Herald and I had only been the editor for 10 months when Boone Newspapers decided to put it out of its misery.

Tommy Wilson, who was the publisher of both the Lamar Democrat and the Luminary-Herald, gave us little advance warning. We always put the paper together on Tuesday, then drove the pages over to Lamar to be printed on Wednesday morning.

It was past four p.m. when Wilson walked into the Luminary-Herald's Lockwood office and made the announcement to Donna Shaw, the advertising manager and me.

The paper we were working on would be the last, he said. Lockwood and Golden City news would run as a weekly page in the Democrat.

"Donna, we'll be taking to you to Lamar with us," Wilson said, then he looked directly at me.

"Randy, we're not taking you."

Even though I was only 23 at the time, I was smart enough to know that he did not mean I would have to find my own ride.

For a long time, I wondered if I could have done something that would have saved the Luminary-Herald. In retrospect, I realize the newspaper's demise began years before and that the days of newspapers serving communities with less than 1,000 residents with small business bases were going the way of the dinosaur.

I was the editor of two other weekly newspapers that went out of business, but neither had the impact the closure of the Luminary-Herald did. It was the only newspaper the communities of Lockwood and Golden City did. A page in the Democrat, no matter how well done, was simply not the same.

In August 1989, I was working as managing editor at the Democrat when Publisher Doug Davis told me we were going to launch a weekly newspaper for Jasper. Doug called it the Jasper County News, the last newspaper Jasper had. At the time, Jasper already had a fledgling newspaper, the Jasper Jubilee, published by Brenda Dockery.

Jasper wasn't big enough for one newspaper, much less than two and by the time, the Jasper County News published its last edition in 1990, I was already working at the Carthage Press. I never really had the time to become invested in the Jasper newspaper, so I felt no sorrow at its passing.

In the mid-90s, Carthage Press Publisher Jim Farley asked me to come up with a news plan for Joplin to compete with the Globe. The company that owned the Press shot down the idea, but Jim asked me if we could do a weekly newspaper in Lamar. 

The first edition of the Lamar Press was published in August 1996 and it was a success right from the start- at least as far as the news product was concerned. We were never able to sell much advertising for it and after 49 weeks, it went out of business. 

Though I hated to see it happen, putting out six issues of the Carthage newspaper every week and one issue of the Lamar paper was beginning to wear me down.

With newspaper chains buying up smaller newspapers, then cutting them to the bone, combined with the arrival of the internet, more and more publications, many of which had been the heart and soul of their communities vanished, often taking them with the only source of information about community events, club meetings and sports activities.

Small dailies became the twice-weeklies and then weeklies as greedy, incompetent out-of-town publishers cut every cent possible out of the budget, moved the newspaper's functions to central sites, cutting even more jobs and often had even the editing and reporting done by people who worked at other locations.

The Carthage Press, which had been a successful newspaper all the way into the early 2000s, eventually was shut down, despite the best efforts of editor John Hacker.

Recently, the Neosho Daily News, the newspaper that I was reading before I started elementary school, provided a buyout to the only reporter at the paper (a reporter who also had to cover the news for the Aurora Advertiser). I wonder how long it will be before that newspaper also publishes its final issue.

The Webb City Sentinel will publish for the final time next week.

Unlike the chain-owned newspapers that were assassinated by their hedge fund owners, Bob Foos is closing the operation on its own terms, never having betrayed his readers.

Foos, who in his 70s, is retiring. In August, when he announced his plans, I wrote what I thought made the Webb City Sentinel an outstanding newspaper and how much I enjoyed reading it when I began working at the Carthage Press.

As the area reporter during the first three years at the Press, I covered the Webb City and Carterville area and was interested in seeing what was going on, what stories I had missed and seeing a couple of things that made the Sentinel stand out from other southwest Missouri weeklies.

One was the brilliant cartooning of the late and dearly missed Nic Frising. No other small weekly in Missouri that I knew of had a cartoonist, much less one as gifted as Nic.

The other was the photography of owner/editor Bob Foos. Foos has been one of the top photographers in Missouri for four decades.

The Webb City Sentinel not only provided a weekly update on city and school events and extensive community coverage, but it had a look unlike any other area newspaper- an easy-to-read design, Foos photos, Frising cartoons- each edition offered a visual feast.

What I failed to mention and it was a glaring oversight, is the main reason the Sentinel was such a good newspaper was the investment its publisher made in the community.

Bob Foos put Webb City first.

The Sentinel will be missed.