The 102-year-old La Feria News

The Advance News Journal published a story last November that carried this headline:

“Advance buys 102-yr-old newspaper.”

In the end, though, the deal never happened.

Granted, it would have been nice, very nice, to have one newspaper in Hidalgo County, The Advance, and another paper in neighboring Cameron County, The La Feria News. Standing in our way, however, was this one simple fact: The work required to put out another weekly newspaper, 52 new deadlines a year, is more added stress than I can handle.

“You mean you’re a failure.”

Sure, that’s one way of looking at it.

Then again, there is my more mature, albeit boring, self who whispered into my ear:

“You’re going to regret it if you go ahead with this La Feria deal.”

Unlike my younger self, prone to action before giving anything serious thought, I’ve learned to listen to that voice inside my head.

If I had only listened to it when I was younger, how much pain, money, stress, and suffering would I have avoided?

A lot.

La Feria News

With regard to the La Feria paper, part of it was hating to see a 102-year-old newspaper simply wither up and die.

So we got to work here at The Advance.

After coming to terms with the former owners, who had decided to simply shut up shop and had already published a final goodbye on the previous week’s front page, we made a new template, designed a new masthead, got an address in La Feria, worked with the post office to transfer the name on the periodical permit, spoke to the school district about the arrangement it had with the paper, yada, yada, yada.

By this time, I was already tired.

I even went so far as to interview La Feria Mayor Olga Maldonado and write an 874-word story about a recent city election that saw voters shoot down a city proposition. If passed, it would increase city commission terms from three years to four.

The Advance staff had put together the Nov. 5, 2025, issue, and the only thing left was to press the send key on the keyboard and upload the file to the printer.

That’s when that little voice inside my head went to work, invoking its right to logic and common sense:

“You know that when you hit that send key, you’re locking yourself into putting together two newspapers each and every week instead of one.”

No arguing with that. Every week moving forward, once I, we, were done putting out The Advance, we’d have to jump right over to putting out The La Feria News.

Then there was the job of coordinating the work with our distribution guy and his team.

For once I agreed with that annoying voice inside my head, which is always the more rational of the two – me vs. it.

So, I put the Nov. 5 issue that was already put together into a file folder and went to work explaining my choice not to take on more work.

In the end, sure, I’m glad we didn’t pull the trigger, but it is what it is. Happy and sad, if that makes sense. Bittersweet.

Newspaper Decline

Besides being 102 years old, one reason we wanted to save The La Feria News is that too many newspapers, both weeklies and dailies, are disappearing at an unprecedented pace, leaving large gaps in news coverage.

Over the past year alone, approximately 136 newspapers in the U.S. have closed up shop, according to a recent report published by Northwestern University.

Since 2005, the number of newspapers across the U.S. has dropped from 7,325 to 4,490, with weekly newspapers bearing the brunt of the decline.

To make the future look even less bright, two newspapers per week are shutting down, according to the Northwestern report.

Twenty years ago, according to the same report, 365,460 people worked at newspapers compared to the current number, 91,550.

Print media, almost all of which now has a digital component, survives, thanks in large part, to print ads and public notices.

As an example, for more than 40 years, H-E-B advertised in The Advance.

Then one week, the billion- dollar Texas-based company basically stopped almost all of its ad business with newspapers and sent those ad dollars instead to Silicon Valley and the social media platforms based there, which allow their owners to buy those 200-foot yachts.

In the grand scheme of things, for Texas newspapers, and H-E-B is just one example, the loss of ad revenue was huge.

Most car ads went digital, you name it, and on and on it went.

Goodbye, Walmart, Walgreens, Sam’s, and I can’t remember the others right off the bat.

Not complaining. Grateful for the business we have, but taking on another newspaper at this stage of the ad evolution, just wasn’t a good idea.

Not to mention the simple fact that I can’t write as much as I used to, or deal with any more stress that comes with running a business.

Final note: I heard the other day that someone has started a new newspaper in La Feria — the La Feria Journal. Best of luck.