It’s been a pretty wild time since 2003 when Richard and Mari Radtke purchased three newspapers from Mike Otto, O’Brien County Bell, Paullina Times and the Sutherland Courier.
So much changed while we were publishing, closing, selling, creating and merging newspapers, and raising our kids and now grandkids during those 20 plus years.
Scott has stayed on doing a terrific job covering South O’Brien sports and other events. He has been a very good leader in that role for our staff member Vanessa Rohwer.
When we started publishing newspapers minimum wage was $5.50 per hour. While it is still officially $7.25, no one will work for that. Printing costs have skyrocketed. So have postal rates. Let’s not talk about insurance, any kind of insurance. The whole time, we raised advertising rates just once. Subscription rates, too have only been raised when forced to do so.
It is so sad that today we are announcing O’Brien County’s Bell-Times-Courier will be online only. The free articles are done. Access will be made available in the coming weeks for current subscribers. We will be available to guide you through a sign up process. Current plans are to keep the website active through December 2026.
O’Brien County’s Bell-Times-Courier Sutherland subscribers will be given subscriptions to the Peterson Patriot with Sutherland news. Paullina and Primghar subscribers will be given Marcus News subscriptions for the balance of your subscriptions. This will provide each of you with a hard copy newspaper that will give you weekly local news.
Our broken hearts and tired souls are very grateful to each of you for the years of your support, friendship and faithfulness. We will greatly miss learning about each of you one story at a time.
God bless.
Richard and Mari