Far Left? Far Right? No, “Centrist!”

In 1993, North Forty News launched as a monthly newspaper to fill a vacuum of lack of hyper-local information in cities, mountain towns, and rural areas in Northern Larimer County. At the time, printing costs were low and there was little to no competition from modern online vehicles. Ad sales were quite strong.

But times change, and in May 2017, North Forty News was closing for good. The closing of North Forty News was poised to create yet another “news desert” for the cities, towns, and rural areas the distantly-owned “big dailies” rarely-to-never covered.

Personally, I could not bear to see yet another local newspaper be added to the count of 1,800 that had already gone under across the nation since 2004. So, I stepped in.

As Northern Colorado continues to grow, in addition to ranchers, farmers, and residents of small towns eager to read about their community, we now also reach readers in Fort Collins, Loveland, and Greeley. We also reach young adults who may have just moved here for work but are eager to learn more about not just the block they live on in the city or town to which they moved, but also the entire region of Northern Colorado. It might be argued that our current readers are younger than they’ve been in the past with different interests than those of our readers who may be further along in life.

Due to this increasing and changing demographic, naturally our breadth of topics must expand.

We do our best to remain “centrist” and, for example, when elections roll around, we hope to publish the range of candidate’s viewpoints prior to our readers going to the polls.

But recently, we’ve been faulted as too far right by one reader WHILE we were faulted as too far left by another reader.

Just weeks ago, North Forty News was honored by The City of Fort Collins through being granted a Proclamation that becomes a permanent part of the City record for its service to communities throughout Northern Colorado—I take that as a sign that we ARE doing some things right.

In these challenging times when some people do not understand that print newspapers are a very different product than online “news” (that is often fake), we continue to strive to identify what it is our readers need to know to feel more at home in the place they have chosen to live—some of them for generations and many new to Northern Colorado.

We’d love to hear from you, our readers, as to what you’d like to see covered in future editions. If you see a topic you’d like to see us cover send an email to:

[email protected]

At minimum, we will get back to you.

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Blaine Howerton