WEST SALEM, Ill.—Sources in West Salem are telling Disclosure that the last issue of the West Salem Times Advocate will be produced this week.
Known in recent years as the “Edwards County” Times Advocate, the paper, formerly run by the late Harry Bradham, has changed hands since Bradham’s death in 2004 a couple of times, more recently being run by Bradham’s niece, Erin Bradham, after a purchase by a guy from Trenton following Harry’s death nearly wrecked what little there was of the paper’s circulation.
Erin Bradham subsequently pulled the paper out of near-disaster, and it floundered on despite the lack of advertising support locally, as West Salem is a village that’s on the verge itself of shutting down, after numerous alterations to ownership and operation of Champion Labs has brought about its own problems for the workforce there.
Erin Bradham lost a considerable amount of credibility a few years back when she broke up police chief/fire chief Harv Fenton’s marriage and ultimately married him herself (see related post from earlier today).
Nevertheless, she did what she could with the little paper. It never attained the numbers it had when Disclosure staff was working there (2001-02, brought in by Harry because he was dying and he wanted to hire people to turn it over to); when we worked there, we took the average circulation from 700 in April 2001 to nearly 2,400 in April 2002.
I got crossways with Harry over the fact that he was altering articles we’d produce for him AFTER we’d leave on production night, making the local constabulary look better than they were, and the local meth-makers look worse. Example: He’d change amounts of meth found in busts, adding a zero or increasing the amount of raw product found. He’d also alter facts on investigations, as an example, when Mike Sheridan ran from being sought in Edwards County in the Spring of 2002 and was caught in Lawrenceburg, Indiana; we worked very closely with Indiana authorities to get the accurate account of what happened when Sheridan was apprehended, but when it hit print, facts in Sheridan’s arrest were altered to make it look like Illinois authorities (particularly those in West Salem, aka Jerry Joe McVaigh) had more to do with the arrest than what he did.
Getting crossways with Harry over this was what resulted in my unjust termination and subsequent successful unemployment compensation claim; Harry was all about lying about the situation, however, and he harassed us about it for years. Fortunately, when he died, most of that acrimony died with him. Erin may not have done the best job with what uncle Harry left, but she tried hard; we have to give her kudos for that, as she’s really a very good newspaper person. If indeed the reports coming in to us last night are accurate (and again…we’ve not confirmed this with anyone at the staff there), it’s too bad that all this happened. However, we proved Harry wrong: When we started Disclosure, he said that he would not only outlive our paper’s run, but that his paper would be around long after ours folded. Guess we were right. Again.