Western Hills Press to cease publication (Cincinnati, Hamilton: transfer, neighborhood, wedding)

[skippercollector]

The Western Hills Press, founded by publisher Will Finch and published for the first time on Nov. 7, 1924 , will be shutting down at the end of May after 98 years of weekly publication. Final issue date will be May 25, 2022.

Its best known publisher was Albert H. Huneke. He started working at the Press in 1926, and then bought the company in 1933 and owned it until 1972.

The Western Hills Press was owned by HomeTown Communications after that but continued to be a local newspaper. I worked there as an editorial assistant between 1983 and 2000, at which I point I had found another job. My job was to input all of the local submitted news: births and deaths; engagements, wedding and anniversaries; school news; upcoming events; content of special publications such as a compendium of Green Township (like a list of churches, their addresses and service times); and even an occasional news story.

Gannett bought the Press and its sister publications around Hamilton and Clermont counties and northern Kentucky in 2004, and it was after that the newspaper started going downhill. All the items that I used to work on were discontinued. All of my coworkers eventually left, and at least five years ago the only person left in the Monfort Heights office was the head of circulation. That office’s phone number and address disappeared. There wasn’t even a place to email or snail mail local news. I am assuming that all of these sister publications--I think at one time there were 32, give or take a few--are being shut down also.

In recent years this was what The Western Hills Press contained: reprints of articles from The Enquirer about the West End, Fairmount and Camp Washington (none of which are in Western Hills, while the newspaper’s original coverage area was ignored unless there was a murder in Cheviot or Westwood), local high school sports, local property transfers and the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle (which was what made me continue to buy the paper each week

I suspect Gannett made these changes on purpose so that it could eventually shut it down and have only The Cincinnati Enquirer to publish.

I had to do quite a bit of searching to find all these historical dates and facts. The article in Wednesday’s WHP just mentions the closing on the front page, with none of its history. Even the masthead doesn’t contain it; that is, the volume and issue number. If the volume number was there, it would have been 98 or 99.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid...19540436849942

https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinna...5/daily63.html

[mrstop]

It was a shame what happened to these local papers. We had the Tri-County press in our neighborhood. I enjoyed the hyper local articles it provided. Plus it was a great job for the kids and I felt the paper was a great way to support it. My son did it for a couple of years. They then merged the papers to cover more of Hamilton County. No longer were there local articles of interest and I dropped my subscription.


I complained to the editor, but was met with the readership is declining, blah, blah, blah. They basically did to the neighborhood paper what they did to the larger local paper by cutting all of the relevant local content. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[Ohiogirl81]

That really is a shame.

It's sad to see the demise of the community newspaper. For so many of us in the editorial side of newspapers, community newspapers were our first jobs. An awful lot of us stuck around, too, appreciating the community aspect of the publication, and sacrificing more money for more control and more self-satisfaction.

I worked for several competitors in Warren and Clermont counties in the 80s and 90s; the rivalry with the Press newspapers was fun and we kept each other on our toes while developing lifelong friendships.

I wish I knew what the answer is for community news; online bulletin boards and publications such as Patch are spotty in their coverage and in their oversight.