This is the last edition of the Cortland Standard you will ever read.
The family-owned newspaper will cease publication, a casualty of declining readership and increasing costs, including an expected 25% tariff on newsprint. It was the second-oldest family-owned newspaper in New York, but one of the five oldest family-owned newspapers in America.
“I hoped this day would never come,” said Publisher and Editor Evan C. Geibel. “I’m so very grateful to my colleagues and the community for what they’ve done for me, my family and each other.”
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A note from the publisher
What the loss means to you
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The Cortland Standard Printing Co. will file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. After that, all business and legal decisions will be the purview of a court-appointed trustee.
The final 17 employees have packed up their offices, filed their final stories. The closure is not the first of a declining news industry, nor will it be the last.
“A free press is a crucial part of our democracy—so important that it was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution,” reports Close Up Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, civic education organization. “Once a staple of information, newspapers have been steadily declining and disappearing for decades. There are nearly 6,000 newspapers that publish in the United States and, on average, two shut down every week.”
The Cortland Standard’s first edition was peeled off a flatbed press on June 25, 1867. It featured a recipes for spring peas, a profile of Civil War generals, a plea against smoking (nearly a century before the Surgeon General got involved) and a poem — “An Ode to Otter Creek.”
William H.Clark acquired the Cortland Standard in 1876 and his family has owned it ever since. Geibel is the fifth generation to sit in the corner office. Clark erected the building at 110 Main St., in 1883, where the company has been ever since.
In the ensuing decades, the newspaper reported on the Spanish-American War and the sinking of the Titanic. It told of the start — and the end — of the War to End All Wars, and the war after that. And the one after that, and after that, and after that. It told of the panicked days following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the mobilization to stop fascism even in Cortland, where the Courthouse dome was painted to prevent glare guiding enemy bombers.
It detailed the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, endless decades of county fairs, weddings, business announcements and the growth of a community. The Cortland Standard is actually older than the city of Cortland, itself. The city was incorporated in 1900, although it had been settled in 1791 and became a village in 1853.
When Martin Luther King Jr. came to Cortland, a reporter was there, as it was when Olympian Jesse Owens visited. It reported, in 1967, the first efforts to convert Main Street to one-way traffic, and 55 years later, the efforts to convert it back to two-way traffic. It missed the first reports of man landing on the moon, because the newspaper never published on Sundays.
Still, those archives of a community’s history remain in the building, where editions were bound in volumes kept on the building’s third floor, then archived via microfiche and later digitized.
In 2017, as Geibel took control of the company, the Cortland Standard declared this mission statement:
“We will seek the truth.
“We will pursue news of value to our readers and our community with neither fear nor favor.
“We will give our readers the information they need to make decisions to improve their lives.
“We will hold our sources and governments accountable to the community for their actions that bear on the community interest.
“We will set the agenda for public discourse. We will seek to challenge the assumptions of our sources, our readers — and ourselves.
“We will speak truth to power.
“We will give voice to all segments of our community.
“We will exercise and defend First Amendment rights, particularly the freedoms of press and free speech.
“We will be accurate. Our news reports will pursue objectivity; our opinion pieces will be based on fact and reason.
“We will remain independent, and hold ourselves separate from inappropriate influences.”
Cortland will continue. Future generations will move on and into the world. The journalists, advertising representatives, customer service and production staff will find new jobs, or perhaps retire.
Goodbye Cortland. And Godspeed.
