It’s been a pretty wild time since 2003 when Richard and Mari Radtke purchased three newspapers from Mike Otto, O’Brien County Bell, Paullina Times and the Sutherland Courier.
The Sanborn Pioneer was purchased in 2018 from Scott Chrisman. Scott has stayed on doing a terrific job covering HMS sports and other events. He has been a very good leader in that role for our staff member Vanessa Rohwer. We are appreciative to both of them for their dedication to publishing the Sanborn Pioneer and helping with other newspapers through these seven years.
So much changed while we were publishing, closing, selling, creating and merging newspapers, and raising our kids and now grandkids during those 20 plus years.
When we started publishing newspapers minimum wage was $5.50 per hour. While it is still officially $7.25, no one will work for that. Printing costs have skyrocketed. So have postal rates. Let’s not talk about insurance, any kind of insurance. The whole time, we raised advertising rates just once. Subscription rates, too have only been raised when forced to do so.
It is so sad that today we are announcing The Sanborn Pioneer will be online only. The free articles are done. Access will be made available in the coming weeks for current subscribers. We will be available to guide you through a sign up process. Current plans are to keep the website active through December 2026 with news, features and ads of the Sanborn area. We are also working with area publishers to provide you with a hard copy of Sanborn news. Please submit any news, story ideas, photos or advertising inquiries to ptads@tcaexpress.net .
Our broken hearts and tired souls are very grateful to each of you for the years of your support, friendship and faithfulness. We will greatly miss learning about each of you one story at a time.
God bless.
Richard and Mari

Thank you From the Pioneer

As we say goodbye in our last issue to our readers, we want to express our sincere gratitude for the privilege of being your local newspaper for over 150 years. We wish you all the very best in the future, and we hope that the connections we have made will endure. We will miss everyone of you. Thank you for being a part of the Sanborn Pioneer family.
Scott Chrisman and Vanessa Rohwer.