Dear Plainsman Readers,

As we headed into 2025, we promised one more year of printing the Plainsman Herald. Because of your continued demand and loyalty, we adjusted rates, made changes, and found a way to keep the paper in print throughout the year.

The year 2025 brought challenges both exciting and exhausting. Putting together a newspaper each week with me in Springfield (most of the time) and Kent in Wyoming is no small task  but somehow, we’ve made it work. This year alone, the Plainsman Herald was assembled from Springfield, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Joplin, Fort Lauderdale, and even the Bahamas  all to make sure you received your paper.

We want to be honest with you. Keeping a small, rural newspaper alive in today’s world is incredibly difficult. Rising costs, fewer printers, changing technology, and a shrinking industry have made each year harder than the last. By December of 2025, the reality of possibly closing a 139-year-old paper felt more real than ever, and it brought great panic within our newsroom.

As many of you have read, in last week’s edition our previous printing costs increased through no fault of our printer. They were great to work with and treated us well, but the problem remained: how do we keep printing the Plainsman Herald at all?

Kent and I spent countless hours on the phone  as we often do just to get the paper printed each week  brainstorming, pricing, and searching for answers. I reached out to printing companies across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, which led to many conference calls and long conversations. None of this came easily.

We are grateful to share that our first edition of 2026 will be printed in Pampa, Texas, then delivered to Guymon, Oklahoma, before making its way to Springfield, and then out to you our readers in Baca County and beyond. Because of this change, our publication date will move from Wednesdays to Thursdays, meaning the paper will now be in your hands on Thursdays.

We are thankful to continue printing into 2026. But just as we said last year, the future beyond that including 2027 — will be a discussion we face in December.

And this is where we need to be very clear: we cannot do this alone.
Local journalism survives only when the community believes in it enough to support it.

If this paper matters to you, we need your help:

• Subscribe
• Renew
• Volunteer
• Sponsor content
• Tell others about us

Every subscription, every ad, every shared story helps keep this paper alive. Continuing the Plainsman Herald is not easy but because of you, it is still possible.

Thank you for standing by us, believing in this small-town newspaper, and supporting a paper that has served this community for 139 years and counting.

Sincerely,
Hunter Babbitt