The place we call home

When a newspaper disappears, it doesn’t happen with the fanfare of a going-out-of-business sale. There are no “final edition” banners, no ceremonious farewells. More often, it happens quietly – one week the paper arrives, the next week it doesn’t.

That’s what happened recently to eight Wyoming newspapers owned by News Media Corporation. Without notice, the offices locked their doors. Websites stopped updating mid-sentence. Subscribers, reporters and advertisers found out at the same time: it was over. The cause was not a shortage of stories to tell, but a debt so deep that the company could no longer keep its promises.

These were not just businesses on a ledger; they were lifelines for their communities. A local paper is where the town sees itself reflected – school board votes, high school game scores, new business openings, obituaries, court records, the occasional triumph, the occasional scandal. Without it, something essential is missing, and that absence is not easily filled.

The Buffalo Bulletin is not owned by a distant corporation. We live here. We raise our children here. We work in the newsroom and out on the street. We know the stories because we live here. When the parade turns up Fort Street to avoid Main Street construction, we are there. When a blizzard closes the mountain pass, we’re already on the phone.

Our finances are sound. But newspapers are not self-sustaining monuments. They’re living institutions that depend on the communities they serve. The truth is, a paper’s survival is never guaranteed – not even ours – unless people decide it matters enough to read it, support it and share it.

A community newspaper is not a luxury. It’s a kind of infrastructure, as essential to the health of a place as a reliable water system or a passable road. Without it, rumors replace facts, memory fades, and civic life becomes less connected and less accountable.

Communities don’t lose their newspapers because their stories aren’t worth telling. They lose them because debtors far away have the power to decide their voices no longer matter. Here, in Buffalo, we still have the power to decide otherwise.

We hope you’ll keep deciding with us – every Thursday, in print and online – so we can keep telling the stories that make Johnson County the place we call home.