Utah County's small-town voice silenced

Feb. 19 will mark the end of an era for several communities in north Utah County when the Daily Herald stops publishing five community weekly newspapers.

For the first time in 106 years, people living in American Fork won't be getting the American Fork Citizen. In the case of the Lehi Free Press, 118 years of a community newspaper tradition, dating back to the Lehi Banner, will come to an end. The Pleasant Grove Review, the youngest of the publications in what used to be known as the Tri-City area, will end 97 years of continuous publication.

The other papers to be terminated are the Lone Peak Press, an offshoot of the Citizen, and the Orem Times, which was founded in 1933.

The history of Utah's cities and towns — as it has been written week after week in the pages of their hometown newspapers — captures the day-to-day life of the community in more depth and detail than could ever be compiled in a single book. It is an unparalleled record of births and deaths, weddings and funerals, major news events and small-town happenings.

Anyone who has subscribed to one of Utah's more than 50 weekly or biweekly newspapers will recognize the hole that will be rent in the fabric of the community when these papers cease to exist.

In a sense, the north Utah County weekly newspapers are the victims of our times. Fewer people are reading newspapers. The Internet has ravaged print classified advertising. Add in the current economic downturn, and you have an atmosphere that's toxic for newspapers.

But the general decline of these newspapers can be traced back to 1999 when the Daily Herald, then owned by Pulitzer newspapers, purchased the American Fork, Pleasant Grove and Lehi newspapers from the local owner. At the time it was trendy for daily newspapers to purchase the surrounding weeklies and then leverage the increased circulation into greater advertising revenues. In the process the managers at the daily newspaper damaged their new acquisitions by redesigning the nameplates to resemble the Daily Herald's and combining local celebration news — weddings, missionary announcements, birthday announcements and Eagle Scout awards — into a common section to cut production costs. They also eliminated the newspapers' editorial voice to avoid conflicting opinions with those expressed in the daily newspaper's editorial page, effectively silencing a long-time advocate for each of these towns.

The resulting product was less like the community newspaper readers were familiar with and more like the Daily Herald, to which less than a third of them chose to subscribe.