The Nephew Was the Reason

Cedar Valley News
May 18, 2026
The Nephew Was the Reason
By Teresa Nikas

There was a barbershop one town over from where I grew up.

It had been there sixty years. When I was a girl, my father drove twenty minutes to it rather than five to the shop nearby, because the barber knew how my father wanted it cut before he was in the chair.

By the time I was grown, the old barber had handed the shop to a nephew. The nephew was not unkind. He was just somewhere else. He cut hair competently, asked no questions, and remembered nothing. The shop still cut hair. It no longer sold what it had always sold: the feeling of being known.

It closed fifteen years ago. The nephew blamed the chain salon by the highway. The salon was real. It was also twenty-five miles away, and had been there nine years before the shop went under. The salon was the weather. The nephew was the reason. If I am honest, the shop had died some years before it closed. The chair stayed full a while longer. But what made it his shop was already gone.

I have been thinking about the shop because I am thinking about newspapers.

Newspapers have been closing for twenty years. Hundreds of them. At nearly every funeral, the cause of death has been given as the internet. The reader went online. The advertising went online. The classified page, which paid for everything, went online and did not come back.

All of it is true. I will not tell you the internet was a ghost story. The loss of the classified page was a real wound, and some good papers, run by people who never forgot their readers, bled out from it anyway. I will not insult those papers by pretending otherwise.

But here is what I cannot get past.

The internet did not arrive at one newspaper. It arrived at all of them on the same morning, the way weather arrives at every farm in a valley at once. If the internet alone were the killer, it would have killed evenly. It did not. Some papers are still here, and they are the ones who never forgot they had customers.

A newspaper is a business like any other. Its customer is the reader. It can forget the reader the way the nephew forgot the men in his chair.

It looks like this. The paper covers the distant outrage instead of the school board, because the outrage is cheaper and comes pre-written. It talks down to the reader. It treats the reader not as a neighbor but as an audience to be counted and sold to advertisers. It becomes, a little at a time, less useful, less surprising, less honest. Then it watches its readers leave, and says the word internet, the way the nephew said chain salon.

The reader did not leave because a screen was shiny. The reader left because the paper had stopped being worth the trip. A reader forgives a paper anything except the sense it has stopped seeing him.

Cedar Valley News is sixty-eight years old. It was founded in 1957, when this valley had more farms than streetlights. It has outlived a great many papers, and the fact buys it nothing. The cemetery is full of old businesses who thought age was a wall around them.

A year ago, on June fifth, we started sending these editorials to you a new way, and reading them aloud a little after, because a paper unwilling to walk to where its readers are is composing its own last sentence. June fifth marks one year of the effort. One year is not a birthday. It is a progress report, and only the people holding it can grade it.

I will end with a test. It is not about newspapers.

Every business you depend on is, this week, either remembering you or forgetting you. The bank. The grocer. The garage. You already know which ones still see you and which ones have started looking past you. The ones who still see you are worth your loyalty while they are here to receive it.

Tell us on the Facebook group about a business who never forgot you.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. The stories are welcome too — the shop, the counter, the person who knew your name and remembered it. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the long decline of American newspapers and the loss of classified advertising revenue are real.

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