Looking back at The Blade

Many people have wondered why the Fairbury Blade finally disappeared after serving this area for roughly a century and a half.

For generations, the Blade had been one of the most familiar institutions in town. It carried the local news, school activities, sports, weddings, obituaries, advertisements, and the ordinary weekly happenings that told the story of community life. When it vanished in December 2022, many local people felt as if Fairbury had lost an old friend.

Earlier research on the history of the Blade newspaper found the newspaper’s roots stretched back to the Independent in 1871 and later to the Blade itself. Over the decades, ownership changed many times, but the paper continued to survive. That long survival makes its final collapse all the more noteworthy.

The short answer is that the Blade did not die because Fairbury quit caring about local news. It died because the business model that had supported small-town newspapers for more than 100 years was slowly falling apart. In earlier times, newspapers made most of their money from advertising. Subscriptions helped, but advertising paid the bills.

The decline did not happen all at once. It came in stages.

One major local turning point came in November of 2017. That was when the Blade closed its Fairbury office. The last 20 years of bound Blade books were taken to the Pontiac Daily Leader office. The older bound books, dating from about 1877 to 1999, were donated to the Fairbury Echoes Museum. At the time, this move may have looked like routine consolidation, but in hindsight, it was one of the clearest warning signs that the paper's center of operations was drifting away from Fairbury itself.

From there, staffing continued to shrink. Over the next five years, employees were gradually laid off, and by 2022, only one employee, Erich Murphy, remained connected with both the Blade and the Leader. A local newspaper cannot maintain much of a local heartbeat when its staff has been cut to almost nothing.

Another major turning point came with corporate consolidation in 2019. That year, the Blade became part of a massive national merger between GateHouse Media and Gannett. This merger created the largest newspaper company in the United States.

But there was a hidden problem behind that merger.

To finance the deal, the new company borrowed an enormous sum of money — roughly $1.8 billion. That debt did not simply disappear. It had to be repaid, with interest. Industry analysts estimated that the company would need to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in costs every year to manage and pay down that loan.

When a company carries that much debt, every expense suddenly comes under scrutiny. Payroll gets reduced. Offices get closed. Printing operations get consolidated. Small-town newspapers, which already operate on thin margins, become prime targets for cost-cutting. Some observers of the GateHouse Media/Gannett deal predicted the end of small-town newspapers.

In plain English, the company had to tighten its belt — and the belt kept getting tighter.

The biggest economic problem was advertising. In the old days, local businesses relied on the hometown newspaper to reach customers. Grocery stores, implement dealers, hardware stores, restaurants, and car dealers all relied on newspaper ads.

But in the internet era, and especially in the Facebook era, that changed dramatically. A local business could now place an ad online and reach customers quickly and cheaply. As more businesses shifted their advertising dollars to digital platforms, the revenue that had supported newspapers for generations began to dry up.

We can see the local effect of that change in a single small but telling detail in the records. In early 2022, Dave's Supermarket was still selling weekly copies of the Blade to customers without subscriptions. But by that time, the store was selling fewer than 20 copies of each weekly edition. That number would have been unthinkably low in earlier decades.

And yet, even in its final years, local people were still trying to keep the paper alive. From 2019 to 2022, Kent Casson provided local news content and Dale Maley provided Fairbury history stories for publication in the Blade. The community spirit was still there.

The problem was not a lack of interest. The problem was economics.

The final stages came quickly. In early December of 2022, both Kent and Dale were notified of orders from corporate headquarters to stop paying all independent contractors. That decision made it clear that the end was near. Once a newspaper can no longer afford to pay the people producing local content, it has lost the ability to function as a true community newspaper.

A short time later, in late December of 2022, after more than a century of publication, the Fairbury Blade ceased operations. But the story does not end entirely in defeat.

After the Blade disappeared, Kent Casson expanded his existing FairburyNews.net website to fill the gap. Local news stories, Fairbury history articles, the “Looking Back” feature, and obituary links all found a new home there. In many ways, that website became the modern equivalent of the old Blade newspaper.

In the end, the Blade went under for the same reason many small-town newspapers across America went under. Advertising revenue declined, readership habits changed, corporate debt forced cost-cutting, and the financial math stopped working.

Fairbury did not lose its newspaper in a single dramatic moment. It lost it one budget cut at a time. And in retrospect, we were probably lucky the Blade lasted as long as it did.

(Dale Maley's weekly history feature on Fairbury News is sponsored by Dr. Charlene Aaron)