Miranda McCeig taps the gas on her mom’s green Chrysler and cruises toward the biggest story in town.
Pittsgrove is farm country, she says as a rye field fades in her rearview mirror. Always has been. Always will be — so long as the families who have lived here for generations have their way.
But change lurks just beyond a thicket of trees up ahead, McCeig says in her soft, measured voice. Locals worry the very essence of this neighborhood is in danger. And there’s only one way to find out what’s really happening.
McCeig, a 28-year-old with wavy brown hair, hangs a right and hurries into Joe’s Butcher Shop, a down-home favorite catty corner from the land in question. Dressed in black boots, black jeans and a black tank top, she steps up to a makeshift newsstand beside the hot dog buns and slaps down 20 copies of The Elmer Times.
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.
“They might have to widen the road, and that would take Joe’s front yard,” McCeig says before explaining the stakes with a question only the most local of local journalists would consider.
“Where would the barbecue spot go?”
Meet possibly the last reporter at the last newspaper in arguably the last place in New Jersey that can afford to lose local news. Tucked in the state’s southwestern corner, 113 miles and a cultural galaxy away from New York City, the tiny Elmer Times is Salem County’s sole survivor of the print apocalypse.
But the newspaper is more than a relic. It’s a lifeline. A treasure. A timeless force connecting people in a divisive world that fractures communities just like this.
“You’re just not going to find that information anywhere else,” says Gary Peterson, 66, a devoted reader from Pittsgrove with an annual subscription.
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.
Closer to Newark, Delaware than Newark, New Jersey, little Elmer takes up less than a square mile. The one-stoplight town is home to The Elmer Diner, The First Bank of Elmer and The Elmer Twist ice cream shop. The rest is a mix of farmland, trees, stately Victorian-era homes and post-World War II houses. There’s no movie theater. No bowling alley. No big box retail.
The borough’s population of 1,350 could get seats for the same Broadway show with room to spare.
But the pull of this community and the country slice of life it represents still endures, with loyal readers subscribing from Alabama to Minnesota and from Arkansas to California.
The Elmer Times’ readers don’t want national politics or regional crime. The language of community is not written in polarizing editorials or incendiary headlines but in hyperlocal coverage of municipal meetings, church potluck dinner notices, Little League recaps and cute photos of Stan Orzechowski and his three kids with the 20-pound carp they caught in Elmer Lake. That’s the paper’s true specialty: photos of smiling children, like the front page news of little Brock Watson winning the Pinewood Derby.
“One of the hardest things we ever did was to get my grandmother to stop putting in when people are going on vacation,” says publisher Mark Foster, 67, a soft-spoken carpenter by trade with long white hair and a Santa Claus beard. “You can’t put that in the paper anymore, because people will rob their houses now.”
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 weekly paper is “not a moneymaker,” says Foster, a modest man more comfortable putting up sheetrock than giving interviews. Its audience is aging. The pandemic put a dent in advertising revenue. With no desire to put The Elmer Times online, no one inside seems ready to admit what everyone on the outside accepts as fact.
“It’s going to be impossible to keep going,” says Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. “No matter how old people get, they’re not going to suddenly switch and change and start picking up print.”
Or will they?
The unlikely trio that powers The Elmer Times — Foster, McCeig and editor Bonny Beth Elwell — refuses to concede that the paper won’t find a new generation of readers. They’re determined to record local history and maintain the same sense of community the core coverage area of Elmer, Pittsgrove and Upper Pittsgrove has always known.
“I throw newspapers at young people,” McCeig says cheerfully. “And I yell at them.”
So goes the battle of The Elmer Times vs. the journalistic end of times, a conflict that embodies the nationwide struggles of newspapers, social clubs and other endangered institutions that have long bonded communities large and small.
Against all odds, the scrappy news outlet outlasted Salem City’s beloved Today’s Sunbeam — formerly owned by the same company that operates NJ Advance Media — and thousands of other U.S. newspapers and trendy websites like Buzzfeed News.
But for how long?
McCeig finishes her long delivery route and pulls the Chrysler into the grass next to the newspaper’s office, a wooden, two-story building with fading white paint and a 1890s hitching post out front.
The worst thing that could happen to her, she says, her friendly tone dropping an octave, is to become the final reporter in the paper’s history.
“We don’t let things die down here,” she says.
A country lifeline
Joseph Klein hasn’t lived in the Pittsgrove area since 1963.
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.
Klein, 95, dissects the front page news, looks for familiar last names — children or grandchildren of long gone friends — and gets a kick out of solving the crossword puzzle when the paper arrives in the mail, he says in a phone interview.
His favorite part is the “Looking Over Your Shoulder” feature in which the paper revisits local news stories from 135 years ago, 110 years ago and so on.
Being able to stay connected “means a lot,” Klein says. He is one of dozens of out-of-state readers, including subscribers in Alabama, Tennessee, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho and Arizona, who can’t go a week without The Elmer Times.
All these years later, Klein can’t help but compare the community he grew up in to the one he reads about today.
“It doesn’t seem like much has changed,” he says. “It’s still an old, traditional town.”
The Elmer Times represents not only home, but a way of life some families have known for generations.
Many of those families have lived on the same street for hundreds of years. Their entire histories — birth announcements, graduations, weddings and obituaries — have played out in the pages of the paper.
“I remember laying on my mom and dad’s living room floor and having it spread out,” says Elaine Trumbull, a loyal reader since 1946 when she was 7 years old. Today, she and her friends “would rather read The Elmer Times than they would anything else.”
It’s the people who make Elmer, says Joe Cardona, who moved to Main Street in 1991. He has lived its motto: “The little town with the big welcome.”
“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.
He started subscribing to The Elmer Times a few years later. He views it as supporting a local institution supporting a vanishing way of life in rural America.
“You worry about those things that make Elmer special,” he says, “and you fight for those things.”
Local families are deeply connected to the land and the paper, says Elwell, 39, the paper’s lone editor, a part-time job just like McCeig’s reporting position.
When the publication was founded, Elmer was the town center for rolling farmland in Pittsgrove and Upper Pittsgrove — the city, if you will, to the hardworking potato farmers of the late 19th century.
Elwell’s great-great aunt and uncle worked at the paper in the early 1900s. In fact, she and Foster are both descendants of the same early settler from the 1600s.
“Here in Salem County,” she says, “everybody’s related.”
McCeig, who stops to clean up litter in the Walmart parking lot during her delivery route, describes Elwell as a saintly figure always taking care of her community. When Elwell is not working part-time at the Camden County Historical Society or volunteering at her church or for the Salem County Historical Society, the unfailingly polite editor who disarmingly laughs at her own words makes sure local groups get published.
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.
The people who show up to community events often tell organizers they came because they read about it in The Elmer Times.
In a place where the country way of life still matters, the paper brings people together event by event.
“It’s the ultimate community newspaper,” Cardona says.
A tradition worth saving
Once upon a time, McCeig was determined to flee this little corner of South Jersey and never look back.
Elwell, who did escape to Georgia for college only to feel the region’s inexorable pull calling her back, captured the reason in one word.
Rural.
“Poverty. Transportation. Teen pregnancy rates. Drug use. You know, it’s got the rural issues,” McCeig says. “I ran off to college, like, ‘Get me out of here.’”
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.
“I thought my life was done,” McCeig says.
Then in 2021, a friend suggested she take a part-time job delivering The Elmer Times.
When the paper’s part-time reporter left for graduate school that summer, McCeig stepped into the role with no prior journalism training, becoming the only firewall for hyperlocal newspaper coverage in a county of 65,000.
Her millennial friends tell her there’s no news in Salem County.
“I’m like, ‘There’s too much news! And I’m the only one covering it,’” she says.
Rather than hiring full-time reporters, the outlet has survived on a revolving door of part-timers and local correspondents paid by the line. Then there are the folks who have helped print the paper or deliver it or performed maintenance at its State Street office, where a sign tells visitors to ring the bell “or yell real loud.”
Anyone who hasn’t worked there has probably appeared in its pages.
“When you have a good experience growing up, and you have a connection with your community, you’re going to want to pass that along to the next generation,” McCeig says, “and that’s why I think The Elmer Times has staying power.”
She fell in love with the winding roads that take her past the rye fields and the tree nurseries, past the abandoned businesses and the John Deere tractors that sometimes drive on the street.
And she fell in love with informing the people who call it home.
“Most people in South Jersey, they don’t want to be told nothing,” McCeig says. “I’m not trying to tell nobody nothing. Except for the facts.”
She wakes up at 4:30 a.m. on Thursdays — delivery day — and hits the Elmer IGA supermarket and various Wawas. The last stops are local convenience stores like Bud’s Market in Alloway, which sells a dozen eggs for $3.99 or a dozen nightcrawlers for $6.49.
“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.
Trumbull, 84, picks up the paper from her post office box every Friday morning and reads it cover to cover — even the advertisements, which are mostly from local, family-owned businesses just like The Elmer Times.
“I read the local happenings. I read the birthdays. I read the anniversaries. And I read the obituaries, and then I read the cartoons that they have. And all their political news,” Trumbull says.
There are Facebook groups where local residents can get tidbits about what’s happening, according to Cardona. But unlike the sanctity of the newspaper, those threads often devolve into fights.
“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.”
Headlines are intentionally dry, like “Pittsgrove Township Committee Holds Regular Meeting.” Dispatches from local government meetings are presented in chronological order, allowing readers to extract their own personal headline along the way.
“When you’re my size, you can’t piss off anybody,” says Foster, a slight man of average height. “So you gotta be neutral.”
The paper might have never survived the 1880s without the Fosters. The original owners, who called their outlet The Elmer Gazette, “couldn’t make a go of it,” Foster says.
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.
Mark Foster got his start at the paper sweeping floors as a child. He also contributed as a pressman while launching a career in carpentry, sheetrock and drywall. His grandmother and aunt had turns at the helm before his sister, Pamela Foster Brunner, took over when their father, Preston Samuel Foster Jr., died in 1992.
Then in 2005, it was Mark’s turn.
He’s hands-off with editorial decisions, Elwell says. But he used to lay out the paper via computer until he began losing his vision a few years ago due to medical complications.
“There’s a legacy of The Elmer Times that I’m joining,” McCeig says. “There’s a pride to that. I want to join that institution and keep it going for as long as I possibly can.”
She’s seen the impact her reporting can have.
When county commissioners passed on installing a four-way stop sign at a treacherous intersection in Alloway, she reported the decision in the newspaper with their explanation that a traffic study found no need.
The next four meetings were packed with residents and local fire chiefs telling stories about the crossing’s tragic accidents.
A four-way stop sign was installed.
The last stand?
Foster spent his 67th birthday in the hospital last December after a heart attack.
He had been a regular presence in the office, lending advice or chatting with customers who stop in. His visits are now infrequent.
But the paper is always on his mind.
“I worry about it weekly — is it coming out this week?” he says with a laugh.
If he dies, his stepson won’t know how to run the company, he says. He also doubts any of his nieces or nephews want to lead a paper that won’t turn a profit.
“It’s not a moneymaker,” he says, “and everybody wants money.”
Foster decided he will soon sign over his majority stake to Elwell. He trusts she will do her best to preserve the company’s legacy.
History is everything here. It’s why Foster stepped up to take over the paper from his sister. It’s why The Elmer Times is still eight columns wide, so much wider than modern papers that Foster has been accused of making the paper bigger.
It’s why Foster’s great-grandfather’s wooden roll-top desk remains in the front corner of the office with a framed photo of Foster’s father on top. It’s also why there’s glass photo proofs here from the early 1900s and a copy of The Elmer Times Almanac from 1925.
Foster walks into a back room and points up. He still has the faded “Elmer Times Printing House” sign that hung on the building when it opened in the middle of a cornfield in 1892, well before there was a street out front.
Losing the paper would be devastating, Trumbull says.
“There are a lot of things you wouldn’t know about,” she says.
And Salem County readers are among the oldest and least digitally connected in the state, making The Elmer Times indispensable.
More than 2,500 American newspapers have died since 2005. Rural areas have been hit especially hard by the mergers and closures, according to Murray, the Montclair State expert.
The consequences of news deserts can include lower voter turnout, government corruption and a general decline in civic engagement, according to Murray.
“People lose their sense of community,” Murray says. “You don’t feel as tied to where you live when you don’t know what’s happening.”
If the paper doesn’t make it, Foster imagines everything will be sold off.
“It will just disappear like the rest of them,” he says quietly.
But he still clings to hope. Elwell isn’t giving up. And McCeig will be damned if she’s the final reporter to write her name on the office’s basement wall alongside those who came and left before her.
“If it weren’t for you folks doing what you’re doing…” says Peterson, the loyal reader from Pittsgrove, without finishing the thought. He recently stopped by the office with $30 to cover an annual subscription that lapsed.
Elwell can’t envision putting the news online. That breaks with tradition.
“It’s on paper, which can last,” she says, “unlike digital things.”
So McCeig pushes on. Up at 10:45 p.m. on Wednesday night covering the Elmer Borough Council. Up at 4:30 a.m. Thursday morning to deliver papers.
The job has been an awakening, she says standing in the office near a photo of Samuel P. Foster. She found herself and her community through this newspaper.
It survived the shift from radio to TV, and from TV to the internet. Her mission is to see it endure the next shift, another old-fashioned piece of Salem County worth saving.
“Long live The Elmer Times,” she says.
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Adam Clark may be reached at aclark@njadvancemedia.com.
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