When I called to inquire about purchasing refurbished newspaper racks, the gal seemed a bit surprised.

“We don’t sell many newspaper racks,” she said.

“Most of the calls we get are people wanting to know if we’ll buy their used ones.”

The steel fabrication company in Texas, which relied on its business with newspapers since 1969, now depends on a much different customer.

Since the pandemic, it has sold thousands of racks formerly used to distribute free newspapers and magazines, but they’re not being used for reading material.

Instead, they’re used to distribute naloxone. Opioid settlement money from pharmaceutical companies, distributed as grants for public health and drug prevention programs, pays for the kiosks.

We have one at our own health department here in Ouray County.

While demand increased for anti-overdose drugs, it declined for newspapers, which continue to close at alarming rates.

Newspapers just aren’t buying many newspaper racks these days.

They ran into the same challenges we have, including rising print and distribution costs and the inability to convert their old racks to accept more coins when they needed to charge more for single copies.

In some cases, newspapers couldn’t find a press to print their papers anymore. Most folks are surprised to hear that if we didn’t have our paper printed by the Montrose Daily Press, the next-closest press is in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That’s not a Plan B.

But we’re fortunate enough to still be printing a physical newspaper, and after consulting with our readers, we decided to continue selling the paper in racks.

If you bought this edition of the Plaindealer at a news rack, I want to let you know that you’ll need eight quarters instead of four to buy the paper in the future. This could happen as soon as next week if we get our new racks in place.

I don’t want anyone to be surprised.

Most of you probably won’t be shocked to learn we’re increasing the price of the newspaper. The real news here is, we decided to keep newspaper racks and invested almost $4,000 in new ones so we could continue single copy sales. Our old newspaper racks had design limitations keeping us from increasing the number of coins we could accept. While other newspapers have eliminated their coin-operated machines, we are keeping them.

We asked for feedback in April from readers. Here’s what we learned:
Although they’re the smallest segment of our readership, rack customers are devoted and they love the ritual of buying the paper from racks.
They do not want to transition to reading the e-edition and love reading a physical newspaper.
They want us to keep newspaper racks, and they’re willing to pay more to receive their paper that way. And they are willing to use racks in other locations if we reduce the number.

One loyal reader, who has been purchasing his paper from the racks since 2012, begged us not to get rid of them.

He despises the extra crease in the newspaper that he experienced when he received the paper in his mailbox.

We will be offering newspapers at racks in six locations and removing the old racks.

This is the first time we have increased the rack price of the paper since 2021, when we went from 50 cents to $1.

Single copies had sold for 50 cents for 30 years.

We can’t wait another 30 years for a price increase. As caretakers of your local newspaper, we know that would be irresponsible and unsustainable.

We know some folks might think $2 for a newspaper is too expensive. I would ask them to please consider the $6 coffees, their $9 subscriptions to Netflix (with ads) and the $15 burgers we order and don’t really blink an eye at anymore. Our trash service bill has gone up several times in the past three years, though we don’t know why and we just keep paying.

I don’t know how to put a price on being informed, engaged and connected to your community, so you can participate in the democratic process. So you aren’t the person saying, “When did they do that? No one asked me,” when you find out about local government decisions, too late.

Some people think social media is enough. Apparently they want to continue to give billionaires fodder for their algorithms instead of investing a pittance for actual humans to provide vetted information.

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t here taking photos of your kids at graduation. He’s not in Ouray sitting in the courtroom’s creaky wooden chairs that could double as torture devices, documenting sex assault trials and developing sciatica. Zuck’s not hustling to cover a meeting where people are mad about the city police department, prairie dog mitigation or any other topic du jour here.

As newspapers have weathered the challenges brought on by the internet and struggled to convince folks to value news enough to pay for it, the business model for newspapers hasn’t kept up with our economic reality. For almost 200 years, newspapers have relied heavily on advertising to stay alive. “Free” papers put even more of the burden on their advertisers, without a verified readership of subscribers who prove they actually want these papers in their homes each week.

We need to make sure we’re keeping up, like any business, or we won’t survive.

More than 3,200 newspapers have closed in the last 20 years in the U.S., according to the Medill School of Journalism’s State of Local News 2025 report. Since 2005, nearly 40% of all newspapers in the U.S. have vanished. Some of them were due to mergers or bigger companies buying smaller ones and shutting them down. But lately, it’s disturbing to see how many family-owned publications — the only newspapers in their communities — have shuttered.

Independent newspaper publishers, like us, are calling it quits. It’s just too hard.

We don’t want to be part of those statistics, so we’re working hard to keep the Plaindealer strong. Stay tuned for more ways you can help us ensure the future of this newspaper.

We’ll also be looking at raising subscription rates, given our rising costs, including the average 9.4% increase we’re expecting from the U.S. Postal Service for delivery coming in July. It’s the ninth rate increase we’ve had since 2020. We can’t continue to absorb increased operating costs if we want the paper to continue to exist. The Plaindealer just turned 149 years old, and we’d like to celebrate our 150th birthday next year (and beyond!).

We hope you’ll help us blow out the candles. Thanks for supporting your local newspaper.

Erin McIntyre is the co-publisher of the Plaindealer. Email her at erin@ouraynews. com.