The last stand of the last newspaper in the rural heart of South Jersey.
Mark Foster stands in front of The Elmer Times building. The paper has beat the odds for nearly 140 years. But for how much longer?Miranda McCeig taps the gas on her mom’s green Chrysler and cruises toward the biggest story in town.
Today’s front page news is the proposed warehouse that could bring 300 trucks a day to this sleepy intersection, rattling windows, fouling the air and forever disrupting a slice of rural paradise. The family-owned weekly costs 60 cents a copy. It doesn’t bother with a website. And its approach to news has barely changed since its debut in 1885. Yet the paper is as relevant today to its 1,200 subscribers as it was when it covered the great flood of 1940. And maybe even more so.
Foster runs the paper just like his father before him. And his father before him. And his father before him. He shuffles through the cluttered office in jeans and a neon yellow T-shirt, proudly pointing out old printing press equipment or producing artifacts from underneath piles and inside drawers. But the retired electrical engineer religiously reads The Elmer Times from his senior living facility in Southern California, 2,735 miles away from where he grew up.
All these years later, Klein can’t help but compare the community he grew up in to the one he reads about today.“I throw newspapers at young people. And I yell at them.”The Elmer Times represents not only home, but a way of life some families have known for generations. “Literally when we moved in, our first day, our neighbor brought us a cake,” says Cardona, 56, who attended Glassboro State in the 1980s then married a woman from Pittsgrove.
No upcoming news is too small. Mother’s Day Tea with the Daughters of The American? Print it. Salem County offering free fans for senior citizens? They’ll find space. A Davy Crockett presentation to the Woodstown-Pilesgrove Historical Society? You know the answer. But before McCeig could graduate from Rutgers University, she became seriously ill with complications from hidradenitis suppurativa, a painful and incurable skin condition. She quit engineering school after three years and moved into her mom’s home in Greenwich Township.Then in 2021, a friend suggested she take a part-time job delivering The Elmer Times.
“A lot of the older folks out here, they love their local newspaper,” says Arthur Pullin, who works the cash register. “They’d rather have that than anything on TV.”The recipe for success has been simple. The Elmer Times is always there. The news is affordable. And the articles don’t take sides. “The newspaper is still the newspaper,” Cardona says. “Nothing’s like a newspaper that lasts all week long on your counter, and everybody in the family takes a look at it.”
Enter Samuel Preston Foster, who joined the paper in May 1887 and paid $1,733 for a full ownership stake two years later. A family business was born. He had been a regular presence in the office, lending advice or chatting with customers who stop in. His visits are now infrequent.“I worry about it weekly — is it coming out this week?” he says with a laugh.
And Salem County readers are among the oldest and least digitally connected in the state, making The Elmer Times indispensable.Dave Hernandez | For NJ Advance Media
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