Only newspaper in distressed West Virginia county closes; owner says politics have people down on all news media

McDowell County, West Virginia, one of the nation's most distressed counties, is now a news desert.

The Welch News (the Welch Daily News until 1995) announced March 13 that it would "shutter all operations immediately barring any unforeseen circumstances," such as a sale. Calls to the newspaper today resulted in one ring and a dead line. Welch is the seat of the county, pop. 19,000.

McDowell County (Wikipedia map)

Owner Melissa Nester told Katherine Skeldon of WVMetroNews that the county's failing economy and dwindling readership and population were the main reasons for her decision: “It’s the financial impact of being in a small, southern West Virginia coalfield community, where we really don’t have the strength in our businesses or the amount of residents who could support a newspaper and what it takes to be operational.”

Nester, who bought the paper five years ago, told Skeldon that it suffered partly from the audience's conflation of community newspapers with larger papers: “I’m terrifed with the direction we’re taking really with all of our media in that the smaller people who are serving the smaller communities are really getting themselves ripped apart due to the larger political nature of the business.”