Happy New Year, east-central Iowa: Fewer newspapers serve you

The I-80 corridor in eastern Iowa, for those motorists interested only in hastening their way between Des Moines to the west and Iowa City to the east, may appear empty save for fields that produce part of the state’s 2 billion bushels of corn each year.

But north and south of I-80 lie many small towns, populated by only a few hundred or few thousand Iowans. Towns like Belle Plaine, Brooklyn, Benton, Marengo, Montezuma, North English, Williamsburg, Parnell, Homestead, Oxford and Holbrook. These are towns whose median household income is less than the $47,000 statewide average.

The people who live in those towns need information to effectively make political and consumer decisions. They need it just as much as people in big cities do. But come Monday, local news may not flow quite so freely in Benton and Poweshiek counties.

Advertisement