But what could be done? Mike Kvarnlov ran the local G.M. dealership for years before recently selling it to his son. He thought it was a tragedy that the paper would be folding. But the new world was what it was.

“Fifteen years ago, we were 50 percent paper and 50 percent radio,” he said of the dealership’s advertising budget. But now, most of the money went to the internet, with print and radio only in the mix to reach older people. And each year, he said, online advertising “gets a larger percentage as the old people are going away.”

The Trouble With Truth Telling

It was sometime after 9 a.m. when Ms. Colden’s remaining staff — Koren Zaiser, 48, the editor, and Jenée Provance, 56, the page designer — rolled into the Pioneer newsroom. Shelley Galle, the longtime office manager, had already taken a job at the Seven Clans Casino across the river.

Ms. Provance mixed the bloody marys. The women hoisted their plastic cups. “We’re going to get this done,” Ms. Colden told them. “We’re going to get it out, and we’re going to do it well.”

Outside there was no grand rally to save The Pioneer. It was mostly another day in Warroad, population 1,88 0. Farmers gossiped over breakfast at the Daisy Gardens restaurant. Workers trudged by the hundreds to their jobs at the big, yellow Marvin window factory.

Part of the problem, Ms. Colden suspected, was that no one could imagine Warroad without the paper that had been publishing since the McKinley administration . “There’s that complacency,” she said. “With a 120-year-old paper, they are just so sure we’re always going to be there.”

There was also the reality that truth telling in a tiny town, while generating good copy, does not always generate love for the newspaper. On that Monday morning Ms. Zaiser, the editor, took her drink to her computer and formatted the Court Report, The Pioneer’s unflinching weekly roll call of anyone who had recently run afoul of the law. For this final edition, a 29-year-old man had pleaded guilty to theft; a 30-year-old man had pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of pornographic work involving minors; a 28-year-old man had pleaded guilty to driving an all-terrain vehicle on a road.