Suicidal thoughts, resilience in a small-town Iowa newspaper’s fierce last stand

Years of conversations with a fourth-generation Iowa family newspaper owner in ‘Beacons in the Darkness,’ a national book by Chicago Sun-Times veteran reporter released today

The talented and intrepid reporter Dave Hoekstra, a former 30-year writer with the Chicago Sun-Times, spent the better part of three years chronicling the struggle of independent newspapers like my family’s to survive amid a perfect storm of challenges and attacks that have shuttered thousands of locally owned papers or forced them to sell to chains wit…