The Amish Cook from Oasis Newsfeatures

Okay, a little news today...

Goodbyes are always difficult.

The Cincinnati Post has run The Amish Cook column each week for the past 13 years. When they first started, they were a bonfide big city paper with over 120,000 readers each day. But The Post has succumbed to the pressures of the internet and the general decline of "afternoon dailies." Many afternoon papers have padlocked their doors over the past decade or so in cities like Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis; Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and others. This is really sad for a newspaper junkie like me to witness. The Post gamely held on longer than most. Today it's readership is a shadow of its former self - around 20,000 each day. With all these factors working against it, The Post is printing its final edition on Dec. 31. And I thought that The Amish Cook would be saying goodbye to Cincinnati. But not so fast...

The Cincinnati Enquirer, the storied 250,000 circulation morning paper of the Queen City, has turned me away in the past, not showing so much as a passing interest in The Amish Cook. But Post readers, worried they would be cut off from the column, swung into action and worked the phone lines. As result, The Cincinnati Enquirer will debut The Amish Cook on Jan. 2. For the first time in 17 years we have a major daily running the column to join the 120 mid-sized and small papers that run it. So on Jan. 2 we will be welcoming many, many, many new visitors to this site. It may get kind of crowded here, but let's give them a warm welcome!

Also....The Amish Cook column will be on this website free of charge each week beginning Dec. 31, maybe sooner. Sometimes you try things and they don't work. People just aren't willing to pay to read something online. The New York Times has found that out the hard way, and so have many other print products. So I shall rely on trying to find an advertiser or advertisers to sponsor the column. No need anymore to go to other bootleg sites for the column, you can just come here and I hope you do. Stay tuned. If you were one of the smallish group of people who DID pay to subscribe....thank you....I will be contacting you in the weeks ahead concerning refunds to be issued.

Now, I do have some even more exciting (to me, anyway) Amish Cook-related news potentially percolating, but I need to remain silent on that for a bit longer:)