When the Print Fades

It seems the Del Norte Triplicate is about to become just another ghost along Highway 101, like the abandoned motels with their faded neon and the gas stations where weeds push up through cracked pavement. The Wednesday, September 17 edition will be the last, and with it goes a voice that has been chattering in Crescent City kitchens, coffee shops, and barbershops for as long as anyone can remember.

I can already hear someone saying, “Well, I get my news online now anyway.”

Sure, you do. You can tap your phone and scroll endlessly, your thumb flicking faster than your brain can keep up.

But that’s not the same thing as reaching into your mailbox, pulling out a folded-up paper still smelling faintly of ink, and spreading it across the table with your toast and coffee. There’s a ritual to it, and rituals are how communities hold themselves together.

The Del Norte Triplicate wasn’t just newsprint—it was a scrapbook for the county. It was the Little League scores, the city council bickering, the high school honor roll, and the obituary for old Mr. So-and-So, who fixed shoes downtown for forty years.

You might not have liked the editorials, and you might’ve muttered something unrepeatable when your neighbor’s kid got his picture on the front page for catching a fish while yours got squat. But you read it. And reading it meant you were part of something.

When a paper folds, it’s not just a business decision—though the folks at Country Media Inc. will remind you that it very much is one.

They bought the Triplicate out of bankruptcy in 2019, tried to make a go of it, and now they’re moving on, like so many others. They’ll keep publishing the Curry Coastal Pilot across the border in Brookings, and I suppose that’s something.

But Crescent City, Del Norte County—this is home turf. Losing a paper here feels personal.

My mother used to clip out recipes from the Triplicate. My father read the classifieds like they were scripture, just in case someone was selling an old boat he didn’t need but absolutely had to look at.

I even made it into the sports section once or twice in high school. These are silly little things, maybe, but silly little things add up to a life, and to a community.

A refund for your unused subscription is nice—if you had more than ten bucks’ worth left, that is—but nobody ever subscribed to the Triplicate for the math. They subscribed because they wanted to know if the county fair was still happening, or when the tide would be low enough for clamming, or which teenager had just signed with the Marines. And the truth is, we need those connections more than ever, not less.

So what now? Well, maybe we can tell more stories ourselves.

Perhaps we should take the time to actually sit down with our neighbors, hear what’s happening in their lives, instead of waiting for it to appear in print. Maybe some enterprising soul will start a scrappy online newsletter or a one-page gazette. The end of a paper doesn’t mean the end of community—it just means the work of keeping it alive gets handed back to us.

Still, I’ll miss the Triplicate. I’ll miss the way it showed up online like clockwork, even when the world didn’t make sense. I’ll miss the odd comfort of knowing that someone, somewhere, was paying attention and trying to get the story down before it slipped away.

Because in the end, a local newspaper isn’t just about news. It’s about memory, and memory, once lost, is hard to get back.

So here’s to the Triplicate—may its pages yellow slowly, and may its stories linger longer than the ink.