After the Advertiser: A year without Alden's weekly paper

For more than a century, the Alden Advertiser was the paper people reached for when they wanted to know what happened at a board meeting, who won Friday night, whose store was hiring, or whose relative had enlisted. Founded in 1914 by J.G. Childs & Son as a monthly serving Alden and nearby towns, it grew into a fixture of Erie County's eastern suburbs. Trade listings put its later circulation around 3,400, with coverage that regularly stretched into Marilla, Darien, and the surrounding countryside. For decades the business operated along Broadway in the Village of Alden under Weisbeck Publishing & Printing, Inc.

Ownership changed hands early. In 1917, Leo F. Whitney, previously of the Record, bought the paper and published it into the late 1920s. In 1932, Joseph A. Weisbeck took over. That purchase began a family run that would define the Advertiser for generations. Joseph's son, Leonard A. Weisbeck Sr., joined as a partner in 1948 and purchased the business in 1959 when his father retired after 27 years as publisher. Joseph died in 1962. Leonard Sr., a lifelong Alden resident and 1940 Alden High School graduate, sold the business to his son, Leonard A. Weisbeck Jr., in 2000 and stayed on as editor until his death in December 2015 at age 93.

Under the Weisbecks, the Advertiser functioned as both newsroom and community scrapbook. During the world wars, publishers printed lists of local residents in service, a practice the Alden Historical Society has cited when reconstructing home-front life from Advertiser pages and Joseph Weisbeck's scrapbooks. Society volunteers have also thanked the paper for archive access, printing help, and artifacts used in Erie County Fair history displays. In a town where school sports, church news, legal notices, and Main Street ads shared the same few pages each issue, that local focus was the point.

On Feb. 1, 2025, publication paused. Mr. Weisbeck wrote an article notifying the community that the paper would enter a hiatus due to his declining health. This marked only the second time in the newspaper's history that publication was halted, following an earlier hiatus taken by Mr. Weisbeck's father for similar reasons. As months passed without a regular Alden monthly returning to porches and counters, the gap became part of daily life. Legal notices for the Town and Village of Alden moved to other publications, including the Akron Bugle. The East Aurora Advertiser, citing the pause and the risk of a local news desert, began carrying Alden Central School District notices and school coverage while Alden waited for a new publisher.

None of that erases what the Advertiser did for decades: put Alden's calendar, contests, obituaries, and debates into print where neighbors could share them. National tallies cited by regional editors show thousands of local papers have closed or thinned out since the early 2000s, with far fewer non-daily newspapers than a generation ago. However, Alden is a newspaper town, due in no small part to the decades of reliable news provided by The Advertiser. The launch of the Alden Echo in October 2026 seeks to honor this tradition by bringing a dedicated local news outlet back to the area. Success in bringing this vision to fruition depends entirely on active community involvement through subscription sign-ups, local business ad partnerships, and submitted stories. The future of local news in Alden will ultimately be decided by the community.