I started a new weekly newspaper called The Elizabethtown Advocate in 2010 after quitting my job in the Philadelphia bureau of The Associated Press.
I had long been interested in running my own newspaper. Elizabethtown was a town of 12,000 people about 75 miles west of Philadelphia and it had lost its longtime paper, the Elizabethtown Chronicle, when the company that owned it shut it down in 2009. I decided to fill the void by starting a new newspaper from scratch.
People were awfully eager to see the new paper come out and I ended up putting the first issue out on Feb. 4, 2010, before I even had a few hundred subscribers. For the next seven years, it was overwhelming. I put out a new issue every week, never taking a vacation. Sometimes I had help with the distribution to stores and I used freelancers to cover high school sports, but other than that, I was running it singlehandedly. Eventually, I managed to turn a small profit, but I was still making less than someone working a minimum-wage job when the company that published the daily newspaper in Lancaster offered to buy me out.
I was willing to listen and eventually we came to an agreement. It included a three-year employment contract. As that was winding down, I decided I wanted to do something different after 10 years as editor of the Advocate. I applied to the Peace Corps and was accepted.
I was hoping that my employer would name a new person to take over as editor of the Advocate and keep running things from the office in downtown Elizabethtown. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. They decided to close the Elizabethtown office without informing me or my boss. They sent a letter to the landlord, who naturally assumed I knew about it and came to the office to ask me about showing it to prospective tenants.
They also decided to add the Advocate to the duties of the editor they had for their weekly papers in Ephrata and Lititz, small towns at the northern end of the county. I warned them that having no person as the local face of non-sports news would damage the paper’s reputation in the community, but their mind was made up. The fellow who edited the Ephrata and Lititz papers is only human; he was spread too thin and the quality degraded. There was nobody physically present in Elizabethtown to get the sort of stories that I found just by living and working in town.
The downward spiral continued and the last issue was published on Dec. 30, 2021. Under the headline “Final edition,” the paper reported, “This is the final issue of The Elizabethtown Advocate.” It went on to promise that the company’s daily newspaper would continue to cover Elizabethtown and the surrounding area.
Could a weekly in Elizabethtown have been viable? I’m not sure, but if they had consulted with me, I could have offered ideas. For example, Elizabethtown College is paying a weekly printing bill for its student newspaper. Its costs wouldn’t have changed much if they had taken over the Advocate – it would have been printed year-round instead of taking summers off, but it would have been a valuable service to the community as well as a better experience for the students working there.
But management had the right to do things as they saw fit. I give them credit for at least making an attempt to run a paper in Elizabethtown.