Sometimes, it takes a village to put out a newspaper.

Kent Brooks, owner of the 137-year-old Plainsman Herald down in the southeast corner of Colorado, was ready to call it quits a few months ago, given the tough economics of publishing a rural paper these days. But at the last minute Brooks decided to survey his readers before ceasing publication to see if they would pay more to keep the Plainsman in business.

Ninety-five percent of them said yes, with many willing to pay double.

Readers began calling, sending emails and mailing handwritten letters and notes begging him to keep on keeping on.

“Heck, they wanted to do bake sales,” he told my former colleague Kevin Simpson, who first wrote about the effort to save the paper for The Colorado Sun. The Washington Post has also picked up on the story now.

“I guess when over 2,000 print newspapers have gone away in the past few years, it is a feel good story when one decides to keep on rolling,” Brooks told me.

Residents of Springfield also told him they’d be willing to sponsor various features in the paper. Brooks said he’s in the process now of nailing down sponsors for Kerry Sherman’s sports page, the popular Hooves ‘n Horns section and Dawni O’Bryan’s Happy Trails articles. He’s also sent out notices doubling the annual subscription from $50 to $100.

Brooks also has been seeking contractors and volunteers to step in now that his daughter, Lexi, who has been helping for four years, is headed back to college, and his son, Colin, who did technical work for the Plainsman, has started working full-time as an apprentice electrician.

“We have a lady who does a garden blog for us, who taught at Springfield High School,” Brooks noted. “I’ve got a lady who lives on a ranch near the border of Western Baca County. She’s our Western bureau.”

Brooks has two cowboy poets who contribute to the paper, including Bill Bunting, whose family still runs a ranch on the high plains of southeastern Colorado that his granddaddy homesteaded.

Brooks also runs some history pieces from books he’s penned on the Dust Bowl and from “Letters from Colorado,” a collection of missives written by Colorado pioneers to the folks they left behind, back where they came from.

A friend’s grandson is on the high school wrestling team and has agreed to write stories and take pictures of the team’s exploits this winter.

Brooks also has a community feed on his website for locals to submit photos, articles, coverage of events, obits, etc. … “And ask your friends and neighbors to do the same,” Brooks suggests on his site.

Additional duties will also fall now to longtime employee Hunter Babbitt, who also oversees the flower shop that doubles as the Plainsman’s Main Street office.

The Knight Foundation also helped out with a grant a while back to enable Brooks to launch a website.

“We’ve gotten good response from the community. It’s clear there is a strong willingness to support the Plainsman Herald,” Brooks told me. “So we’re going to give it a whirl. Now it’s either, ‘Man, this is kind of cool,’ or ‘I’m an idiot.’”

Brooks isn’t the only one making a last stand these days:

• Tom Bredehoft, a 62-year-old businessman, came to the rescue of the Burlington Record a few months ago after Prairie Mountain Media announced it was shutting it down. Bredehoft, who lives 45 miles down Interstate 70 in Flagler, saw the paper as a good business opportunity but also thought it was something that just needed to be done.

“I still believe in community newspapers,” Bredehoft told Simpson, “and I think there will always be people who want to be able to cut the clippings out of the paper. People want to read the sports scores. People want to clip their kids’ pictures. I just believe there’s always going to be a need and a want, and I think there’s people that will support it.”

• The National Trust for Local News has stepped in to help 65 publications around the country, including 23 in Colorado. The nonprofit Trust now has 500 employees, 100,000 paying subscribers, 300,000 print copies distributed per month, $50 million in earned revenue and 2.5 million unique monthly visitors. In other words, they’ve proven that local news can succeed if its truly local, mission-driven and dedicated to community. The chains like Alden Global Capital, owners of Prairie Mountain, and Gannett are the ones who were screwing up local news, not the locals.

The Trust went even further recently and purchased a community press in Colorado to help community newspapers after Prairie Mountain shut down their press in Berthoud and Gannett Newspapers shut down theirs in Pueblo.

The Trust has raised $38 million in philanthropic support, Poynter reported in July. But the goal of the National Trust is to bootstrap community news organizations so they can eventually stand on their on and not rely on institutional philanthropy.

Board member Marcus Brauchli told me the Trust “has been raising funds to operate small-town papers whose owners want to move on, on the theory that well-operated local news can survive if it doesn’t have to return capital to its owners or pay down debt. So it basically takes the cost of capital out of the equation by taking ownership and then offering help in the form of technology and other services that allow the local news company to operate more efficiently and serve its community more effectively.”

There are other heroic efforts afoot out there to save local news:

• The American Journalism Project recently committed $3.6 million to nonprofit newsrooms like Outlier Media and The Nevada Independent, supporting investigative reporting and operational sustainability.

• The Press Forward Initiative distributed $20 million across 205 local outlets, funding initiatives to deepen local coverage and enhance newsroom operations.

• Midwestern News Nonprofit Support provided funding for print-focused initiatives, such as the launch of The Midcoast Villager, which addresses gaps in local reporting for communities in Maine.

• The Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa’s independent student newspaper, just purchased two weekly local newspapers in the state to give their students a place to hone their craft.

What all these efforts have in common is the mission of putting community back in community journalism.

“Small-j journalism, which we just call community journalism, may not be at the top of the Pulitzer list every year, but it sure does build a lot of trust,” Ross McDuffie, the first-ever chief portfolio officer for the National Trust for Local News, told the Nieman Lab recently. “I think that if you want your audience to pay attention when you’re holding the powerful accountable, or you’re giving a voice to the voiceless, or you’re shining a light in dark corners, then you sure as hell better show up when they’re celebrating things that are going well in their community, or, God forbid, they’re mourning a shared tragedy.”

Brooks said something similar to his readers when he was contemplating closing down.

“This newspaper has been a cornerstone of local life for generations, providing news and a sense of connection,” he wrote. “However, the realities of modern publishing demand innovation and collaboration to sustain this vital resource for the future. A great deal of community support is needed to carry on.”

It takes a village to put out a newspaper now, in other words.

And more and more often lately, the village has agreed.