Welcome to our new web site!

To give our readers a chance to experience all that our new website has to offer, we have made all content freely avaiable, through October 1, 2018.

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From the Editor

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Posted

Each week as we promote the Fayette Advertiser’s news articles on social media websites such as Facebook, we continue to see demands from non-subscribers to read our stories at no charge. This cannot continue. The price for a newspaper at the newsstand remains only $1. An online-only subscription costs just $38, which totals out to a mere 73 cents per week.

We appreciate that people want to read the stories that we painstakingly take the time to research and publish. However, stealing our articles will not be tolerated. And yes, copying and pasting articles from behind a paywall for all read is stealing.

Anyone who pirates the newspaper’s articles will be immediately removed from our social media pages, banned from accessing our website, and will forfeit his or her newspaper subscription without refund.

Over the last 15 years, a quarter of all newspapers in the United States have gone out of business partly due to the free dissemination of news articles, and largely due to the shift in advertising from print to digital media. About 2,000 of those were daily newspapers. That means that more than 1,800 communities are now left without any newspaper at all. More than 50 have ceased operations since the beginning of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

A recent Notre Dame study indicated that a community that loses its newspaper could expect the cost of local government to increase by 30% within five years. That is because the watchdog of the community, the local newspaper, is no longer there.

Fayette is lucky to still have a newspaper. But without advertisers and subscribers, this will not always be so.

We at the Fayette Advertiser take pride in publishing factual, and thoroughly researched information. Though publishing this newspaper is largely a labor of love, it takes significant time and resources that are not free. Our small staff is very dedicated to bringing our citizens the news that shapes our lives here in Howard County, and has been doing so since 1840.

So please, the next time you ask someone to copy one of our stories so you may read it for free, consider the implications. You would not demand free food from a restaurant simply because of the aroma. You would not demand free gasoline from a gas station just because you wanted to go for a ride. Think about it.

Justin Addison

Editor/Publisher

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