Rod Worrell calls it a “Christmas miracle,” but just hours before he was ready to print the final edition of the Ainsworth Star-Journal December 25, a new owner emerged.

Now both the Star-Journal and the Valentine Midland News, two weekly papers that Worrell and his wife Kathy had owned for more than 40 years, will not close.

“I wasn’t holding out much hope,” Worrell said.

Potential owners in Ainsworth, he said, were having trouble finding someone to staff the paper — workforce is a major issue in many sectors across Nebraska, including in Ainsworth, a ranching community 140 miles west of Norfolk.

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Graig Kinzie, the owner of the local radio station in Ainsworth, said he’d been trying to put together a group to buy the paper for two to three months, but each group couldn’t come up with someone to run the operation.

Kinzie said he’d even told Worrell, a long-time golfing buddy, “Sorry,” his efforts had failed.

But then the owners of an Ainsworth car dealership, Clint and Katie Painter stepped forward to tell Kinzie their daughter, Erin, wanted to move back to her hometown and was willing to manage the paper.

The Worrells now plan to work for a couple of months to help the new owners — the Painters, Graig and Stephanie Kinzie, and Kirk and Chelsea Peterson — get acclimated.

“I’m really excited,” Rod Worrell said. “I wasn’t looking forward to being the one to shut down a newspaper that’s been around in one form or another for 142 years.”

The same goes for Valentine, a north-central Nebraska community where Dana Anderson, a longtime employee of the Midland News, and her husband, Ken, have purchased the newspaper there, as was first reported by News Channel Nebraska.

In Ainsworth, Kinzie, who has owned KBRB for 15 years, said that he hated to see the newspaper close, even though it competed with his radio station for advertising.

“You hate to see a pillar of your community close,” he said. “From a community standpoint it’s not something we wanted to see go away.”

“It actually all worked out at the very, very last minute,” Kinzie said.

He added that his advertising representatives and accounting personnel can handle a lot of what needs to be done at the newspaper, and he already covers a lot of local meetings and ballgames, which also will be an asset.

The saving of the Ainsworth and Valentine papers comes when community papers have been hit with a loss of advertising to social media, higher production costs, a decline in mailing service and challenges in hiring staff.

Last year, an average of about 2.5 newspapers closed each week nationally, according to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. More than 211 American counties now have no newspapers, creating so-called “news deserts.”

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