Reader's Corner

The last family-owned daily in Mississippi

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Columbus is a town of about 24,000 in eastern Mississippi. Its small downtown has architecturally beautiful "good bones" of pre-World War II buildings now becoming popular for second- and third-story rentals and apartments.

One of the most stately of these downtown structures is the longtime home of the local daily newspaper, The Commercial Dispatch. The newspaper is nearly a century old; it has been based at its current home, on Main Street, since the 1920s; and through that period it has been owned and published by members of the Imes family.

The paper is printed each day in that same downtown site. Like other small-town, local papers, it is in worse shape than it was a decade ago. Then, its daily paid circulation was around 16,000. Now it's between 13,000 and 14,000 (including a new edition for the nearby, prospering university town of Starkville, home of Mississippi State).

But it has held up much better than most. According to its publisher, Peter Imes – the fourth generation of the Imes family to have this role – the paper's editorial staff is about the same as it was a decade ago: a total of 12. That is down from its historic peak of around 20, but has held steady in a time when newsroom staffs have been drastically hollowed out elsewhere.

How has the Dispatch held on, to the extent that it has?

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