Napa County Times staff seeks to continue local news following Highway 29 Media closure
Dear Readers of the Napa County Times,
We have received many messages and phone calls after last week’s announcement by Highway 29’s CEO Marc Hand that he is stepping away from the company and shuttering its publications.
The recurring question was: what can we do to help?
Highway 29 Media, formed in 2022, publishes The Calistoga Tribune, The Yountville Sun, The American Canyon Current and The Napa County Times, a paywall free county-wide site. A bilingual weekly newsletter, Conéctate, has been on hiatus since last December.
The company was formed in 2022 to save the Tribune and the Sun, two weeklies, that had been founded by two women, Pat Hampton in Calistoga, and Sharon Stensaas in Yountville, who both were ready to retire after more than two decades of serving their communities.
The vision, however, was to expand from this base to provide locally owned coverage of all of Napa County. Under the leadership of Mariela Gomez, we launched Conéctate, a bilingual weekly newsletter. At the request of residents of American Canyon, we created an online source of news for them, The American Canyon Current.
While communities clearly cherish their individual weekly papers, we also felt it was important to pull county-wide news together in a pay-wall free site, that we named The Napa County Times.
We got valuable help with this from veteran local journalists including David Kerns, Rebecca Yerger and Paul Franson. The publication also got a great boost from a student intern, Will Coughlin, who is about to graduate from New Tech High School and head off to university to study journalism.
Will it all go away? We hope not. It may, however, take some time to reorganize and relaunch. Our goal is to have a new website up and running by the end of summer. The challenges, however, to fund, create and share local news are daunting.
What can you do to help?
First of all, stay in touch. We have created a link to sign up for news which we will provide as we have it.
Most of all, thanks for reading.
The Highway 29 staff
