In the US, where there is zero chance of an extra newsprint mill being built, a 157-year-old newspaper has bitten the dust and protectionist tariffs are set to sound a death knell for many more.

In New York State, just the prospect of not-yet-implemented tariffs has been sufficient for the Cortland Standard to cease publication and file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection.

It follows the Star-Ledger in New Jersey, which printed its final edition last month.

Publishers aren’t hanging around to see if Trump actions the threatened tariffs, or if things get better: they’ve had enough and they’re going now. Even the goodwill of its staff and a website that is keeping the site alive in the hope a new buyer will emerge is not sufficient to persuade the Standard’s owners otherwise, with managing editor Todd McAdam also citing declining readership and increasing costs. “It was the second-oldest family-owned newspaper in New York, but one of the five oldest family-owned newspapers in America,” he said in a farewell message.

After Chapter 7, decisions will be made by a court-appointed trustee, the last 17 employees having filed their final stories and cleared their desks.

“The closure is not the first of a declining news industry, nor will it be the last,” McAdam said.

From its first edition – “peeled off a flatbed press” and replete with a recipe, Civil War profiles, a poem, and an early plea against smoking – it has seen better times. The Standard is in fifth-generation ownership, and still in the building Main Street that has been its home since 1883.

None of which will help it: Nonprofit the Close Up Foundation says of the nearly 6000 newspapers that publish in the US, “on average, two shut down every week”.

Columbia Journalism Review quotes Columbia Business School professor Brett House that “there is no scenario under which (the tariff imposition) is cost-positive for the media industry. Almost anything that is done here is going to be increasing prices for newsprint.”

If President Trump expected to achieve anything other than a vindictive attack on media of all kinds, it won’t be a new dawn for the domestic newsprint industry. It’s way too late for that.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: The building in Cortland William Clark in 1883, seven years after acquiring the paper (Cortland Standard)