The Bolivar Commercial
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Bolivar Commercial was a newspaper printed in Cleveland, Mississippi, United States, from 1916 to 2020. It was owned by Walls Newspapers and served the area of the Bolivar County in the Mississippi Delta. Its closure in 2020 was attributed to a loss of ad revenue from the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic in Mississippi, and the rise of alternative news sources.
History
The Bolivar Commercial began publishing in 1916. In 1972, the paper converted from a weekly to a daily under the leadership of editor Norman Van Liew. The newspaper was bought by the Walls family in the 1980s. In 2001, the paper was observed to have a daily circulation of 7,200, nearly tripling the circulation about 30 years prior. In 2002, editorial writer Wayne Nicholas was awarded the J. Oliver Emmerich Award for Editorial Excellence from the Mississippi Press Association. One year later, Van Liew was inducted into the association's hall of fame.
Closure
The newspaper's closure was announced in April 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Bolivar Commercial” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.