The Colorado Sun: Only hours after the news broke in June that the Pueblo printing plant she relied on would soon shut down, abandoning dozens of Colorado newspapers, Betsy Barnett, owner of the weekly Kiowa County Independent on the Eastern Plains, launched a search-and-rescue mission to save her newspaper.

What she’d planned as a leisurely road trip from her home in Eads to visit her son in Oklahoma City now urgently veered off the planned route to make a stop in Liberal, Kansas, a little more than three hours into the drive. The town of nearly 20,000 hugging the Oklahoma border has something that Barnett realized that she, and her roughly 900 print subscribers, desperately needed: a printing press that could produce the paper when the Pueblo facility ceased operations in August.

Rolling into Liberal, she met up with Earl Watt, who publishes the local, thrice-weekly Leader & Times, and toured the printing plant that already churns out small newspapers for publishers in four states — Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado in addition to Kansas, with the prospect of printing another in New Mexico.

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