Well folks, It’s time.
After 25 years and roughly 1,300 weekly printed issues, the presses are finally going quiet.
This is our last printed newspaper.
Starting next week, the Freestone County Times moves exclusively online.
It has been one hell of a paper run!
We covered the big stories and the tiny ones that mattered.
We printed the scores when the kids won and when they didn’t.
We covered Chamber of Commerce events, the county budget fights, city council meetings, obituaries, police reports, and the occasional letter to the editor that actually made good sense.
We survived equipment that hated us, ink that stained everything, and deadlines that never showed up late at the newsstands.
For a quarter-century this multi-award winning weekly has been the county’s official paper of record, scrapbook, town crier, and occasionally its therapist.
We were never the biggest newspaper in Texas; we just cared whether the story was accurate and whether Mrs. Pearl’s garden photo ran the right way up.
The decision to end the print edition was easy. The economics of small-county print journalism have grown less amiable.
After 25 years, it is time to stop asking the dedicated staff, advertisers, and readers to keep carrying the load.
Better to close the print chapter while the ink is still readable, than to watch the pages wither.
To every subscriber who paid on time (and the ones who paid late but still paid): Thank You.
To the businesses that bought ads when they could have spent the money elsewhere: You kept the presses rolling longer than pure market forces have allowed.
To the county’s school districts, churches, civic clubs, hospitals, and ordinary citizens who fed us tips, photos, and the occasional casserole: You were the real newsroom.
And to the staff who stayed late, fixed the computers with baling wire, and somehow still laughed about it the next morning: You were the heart of the thing.
I shall miss the smell of fresh newsprint and the quiet satisfaction of watching stacks of papers leave the office every Tuesday afternoon knowing they would be read over coffee, argued about, and eventually used to start a fire.
But the conversation itself is not ending. It is simply changing address. From now on, you can rediscover us online at our website, where the county news, sports, and community notices will continue – faster, greener, and without the paper cuts.
When you want the same experienced news coverage, go to www.freestonecountytimes.com.
Our newspaper editions have been, unequivocally, a work of art.
The last printed page turns here.
Publisher,
Scott Watson Marsters, Sr.
