After 728 weeks: The True Dakotan’s Duke, Karen, Penny and Craig Wenzel are shown with a copy of the paper’s special “Blizzard of ‘1888” edition that was published January-1988. KSFY-TV was coming to Wessington Springs to do a story on the small-town newspaper that bothered to put out a special edition that marked the 100th anniversary of the historic storm. But they didn’t make it due to a blizzard!

You might hear the True Dakotan staff humming the birthday song when you stop in the office this week. Your hometown newspaper reached a couple of milestones that we would like to tell you about. The first one is the beginning of another year of publication as we kick off our 35th year of sending you the all the news that’s fit to print concerning Jerauld County’s residents. For 1,768 consecutive weeks we have published an issue of the True Dakotan, covering the births, deaths, weddings of our people along with highlights from sports, school events, businesses, county and city news, and features of interest to you (we hope they were interesting). We started printing the True Dakotan on a wing and a prayer in 1975, using an antique linotype hot lead typesetting machine. Over the years the mode of production has progressed with the times, passing from the linotype to the Compugraphic laser printers, to the early computers and arriving at today’s electronic paste-up of the paper. Issues of the True Dakotan are now “paginated” on the computer, converted to PDF files and e-mailed to the printers at the Daily Republic in Mitchell where the final step of production takes place each Monday afternoon. From 35 millimeter cameras to today’s digital photography, e-mails to websites, we’ve tried to stay afloat in a changing world that would otherwise have left us languishing in the past. The other observance concerns the 4,000th visitor to the paper’s website. We hear many good comments concerning truedakotan.com. Regular subscribers enjoy seeing the downloadable pictures on the website… often extra pictures that Duke took but we didn’t have room to publish end up as extras on the site. Many people who with a more casual interest in Jerauld County call to tell us they enjoy the site. A week ago a former classmate of mine called from Denver to tell me he regularly visits the website to catch up on some of the news and to read the obituaries. Yes, there have been many changes at the True Dakotan over the past 34 years and I expect there will be more in the future. I doubt that we will be putting your weekly paper together for ANOTHER 1,768 weeks, but one thing you can count on… we will keep doing our best for as long as we are going to be here. Coincidentally, it is also National Newspaper Week. The Wenzels –Craig & Penny

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