The strange case of Washington's newest newspaper publisher

Community newspapers, those familiar once- or twice-weekly papers that line family scrapbooks with tales of athletic glory, county-fair ribbons and Main Street parades, are as much a part of the region's history as courthouse statues and church steeples. A newspaper was often among the very first businesses in a new town.

In the past two decades these small publications have created online editions as a rearguard defense against the Internet, merged and sold to corporate publishers, and in a few cases closed their doors forever. Somehow, most survive and some even prosper, but it's always a sometime thing and good news can become bad news in a financial as well as journalistic sense.