Huron County View
Overview
The Huron County View is a weekly newspaper based in Bad Axe, Michigan, serving Huron County at the northern tip of Michigan's Thumb. It is part of View Newspaper Group, the locally owned Michigan newspaper company founded in 2003 by Lapeer native Rick Burrough, and it carries comprehensive coverage of local government, schools, sports, obituaries and community events across the Thumb region. The paper is published once a week on Thursday. In April 2026 the View captured its sixth consecutive Michigan Press Association Newspaper of the Year award in the Weekly Class A category, for publications with circulation over 15,000 — an unusually decorated record for a county weekly.
The Huron County View in its present form dates from 2011, when View Newspaper Group combined several Upper Thumb papers it had acquired into a single new title. That consolidation created one strong county paper where a group of smaller ones had operated, and the View has since become the principal printed record of Huron County life, from the courthouse in Bad Axe to the Lake Huron and Saginaw Bay shoreline communities.
Formation in 2011
The View's prehistory begins with View Newspaper Group's expansion into the Thumb. In 2009 the group acquired a set of papers from the Journal Register Company in a multi-paper deal that, on the Huron County side, included the Huron County Press, The Thumb Blanket, The Newsweekly and The Harbor Beach Times. Those titles served different parts of the county and the shoreline. In 2011, as the group's own published history records, Burrough combined several of the Upper Thumb papers acquired in that deal into the new Huron County View.
The strategy was characteristic of View Newspaper Group. Founded in Lapeer in 2003, the company grew by acquiring and starting community papers rather than by cutting them: it launched the Flint Township View and Swartz Creek View in 2010, the Flushing View in 2015, acquired the Tri-County Times in Fenton and the Daily News in Greenville in 2019, the Oxford Leader, Lake Orion Review, Clarkston News and The Citizen in 2022, seven more papers in west Michigan in 2024, and launched the St. Clair Area View in May 2025. By then the group counted 22 locally owned community newspapers across Michigan, described as the state's largest independently owned newspaper group, with more than 352,000 copies in print each week across 14 counties. The Huron County View is the group's paper for the Thumb's northern county.
Place and Community
Huron County sits at the tip of the Thumb, bordered by Saginaw Bay to the west and Lake Huron to the north and east, with more than 90 miles of shoreline from White Rock on Lake Huron to Sebewaing on the bay. It was created on April 1, 1840 and organised on January 25, 1859, is named for Lake Huron, and had a population of 31,407 in the 2020 census. Bad Axe, the county seat and largest city, takes its distinctive name from a broken axe found at a surveyors' camp in the area's early days; it was founded originally in 1861 and grew with the county around it. Agriculture is the county's most prominent industry, as in the other Thumb counties, supplemented by seasonal tourism concentrated around Port Austin and Caseville.
The View's coverage area is that whole county and its surrounding communities: farm townships, shoreline villages, school districts and small cities spread across a peninsula where the nearest metropolitan media are hours away. For readers in places like Port Austin, Caseville, Harbor Beach, Pigeon, Elkton, Sebewaing, Ubly and Kinde, the county paper is the medium that treats their councils, schools and teams as front-page subjects rather than regional filler.
Coverage and Beats
The paper's reporting covers the institutions of county life closely. Its court and crime reporting from Bad Axe follows Huron County Circuit Court proceedings in detail, including sentencing hearings, the arguments of prosecutors and defence attorneys, and the words of defendants and judges. Its government coverage follows the Huron County Board of Commissioners and the county's election machinery; in June 2026, for example, it reported the Huron County Election Commission's unanimous decision denying a recall petition against a county commissioner over a vote on the county's renewable energy ordinance, explaining the Michigan law that requires recall language to be clear and factual before signatures can be gathered.
That renewable-energy thread illustrates the View's agenda. In a farming county with extensive shoreline and wind and solar development pressure, questions of zoning, farmland preservation and energy siting are continuing stories, and the paper reports both the technical proceedings — ordinances, resolutions, acreage figures, master-plan arguments — and the politics around them, including recall efforts. Agriculture itself is a standing beat: the paper has reported, for example, on a $3.5 million federal Fertilizer Production Expansion Program grant to Cooperative Elevator Company, an agricultural cooperative with more than 1,100 members and locations across the Thumb, including the company's account of a process that took about three years to secure the funding. Schools, high school sports, business, jobs, obituaries and community events complete the weekly mix described in the paper's directory listings.
Awards and Recognition
The View's distinction within Michigan journalism is documented in its Michigan Press Association record. At the association's annual convention on April 23, 2026, at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center in Lansing, winners of the 2025 Better Newspaper Contest were announced, with entries judged by members of the Arkansas Press Association, who reviewed 2,643 submissions from 89 Michigan newspapers and individual members. View Newspaper Group as a whole earned 134 awards and honorable mentions across news and sports reporting, photography, column writing, advertising and page design.
Among the top honours, the Huron County View won Newspaper of the Year in Weekly Class A — the category for weeklies with circulation over 15,000 — for the sixth consecutive time, sharing the group's headline honours with the Oxford Leader. Group Publisher Wes Smith credited the group's talented and dedicated team of journalists, editors, designers, sales professionals and support staff across its 22 community newspapers, and said the Huron County View recognition reflected both staff dedication and community support. Six straight years at the top of its class indicates a paper that treats design, photography and writing as seriously as reporting — the full craft of a weekly, judged by peers from another state's press association.
People and Leadership
The View's local newsroom in Bad Axe has been led in recent years by editor Seth Stapleton, whose byline and editor's e-mail, sstapleton@mihomepaper.com, appear on the paper's court and government reporting, including its 2026 coverage of circuit court sentencing and of the election commission's recall decision. Reporters such as Paul P. Adams have also appeared in the paper's award coverage — Adams was pictured among the View's honorees in its report of the 2026 Michigan Press Association results. Above the local newsroom sit the group's leaders: founder Rick Burrough, who built View Newspaper Group from 2003, and Group Publisher Wes Smith, who speaks for the group on its launches, acquisitions and contest results.
The group's scale matters to the Bad Axe paper's staffing. A standalone county weekly typically works with a handful of people; a View paper draws on a group of more than a hundred staff across its titles, shared design, printing and digital resources, and sister papers in neighbouring counties — the Sanilac County News and the Tri-County Citizen among them — whose territories adjoin Huron County's. That structure is the economic premise of the whole group: local reporting, group infrastructure.
Thumb Newspaper Heritage
The View succeeded a long line of Bad Axe and Huron County papers. The Bad Axe district library's free digital collections preserve the Huron Tribune and Huron County Gazette from 1883–1884, the Bad Axe Democrat from 1885–1891, the Huron Tribune across 1881–1909, the Huron County Tribune from 1909–1925 and several other early titles, evidence that the county seat has supported competing and successive newspapers since the early 1880s. The better-known Huron Daily Tribune, headquartered on North Heisterman Street in Bad Axe, served the county as a daily for generations and in 1966 was one of the first daily newspapers in Michigan to convert to offset and cold-type printing.
The View's creation in 2011 therefore marked a reorganisation, not a beginning, of Huron County journalism: the weekly absorbed the readership and territory of the acquired Huron County Press, Thumb Blanket, Newsweekly and Harbor Beach Times, and continued the county-paper tradition on a weekly cycle with group backing. Readers who had taken a Harbor Beach or Thumb-area paper found its coverage continued under the View flag.
Editions and Format
The Huron County View is published weekly on Thursday and distributed across Huron County, with an accompanying website at huroncountyview.com carrying its articles, obituaries and advertising. Its directory listings describe a paper covering local news, sports, business, jobs and community events, with advertising offered across print, online display, social and e-newsletter channels through the View Newspaper Group sales operation. The paper's classification in the Michigan Press Association's contest — Weekly Class A, for circulation over 15,000 — places it among the largest-circulation weeklies in Michigan, a scale explained by county-wide distribution in a county of more than thirty thousand residents plus seasonal shoreline households.
The weekly rhythm concentrates the county's record into a single substantial edition: court results, commission actions, school news, sports, farm and energy stories, obituaries and community announcements, assembled by the Bad Axe newsroom and printed within the group's production system. Its year-in-review coverage, surveying the top stories of the year in Huron County, is a signature of that role — an annual stocktaking that only a county paper of record can plausibly write.
Role in the Thumb
For Huron County, the View performs the classic functions of a county paper in a region distant from metropolitan media. It scrutinises the county board and the courts, records the farm economy's investments and pressures, arbitrates the county's argument about its energy future, and binds shoreline villages and inland farm communities into a single readership. The 2026 recall story is a good emblem: a dispute over fifteen thousand acres of potential solar development, a master plan's promise to preserve farmland, and a three-member election commission's ruling on a petition's wording — a chain of events no outside outlet would follow, and every link of which the View reported.
Six consecutive Newspaper of the Year titles suggest the county has noticed. In an era when many Michigan counties have lost their papers entirely, Huron County retains an award-winning weekly, locally edited in its county seat and supported by the state's largest independent newspaper group. That combination — local byline, group backbone — is the View's answer to the economics that have closed so many of its predecessors.
Availability
The Huron County View is available by subscription and across Huron County each Thursday, and online at huroncountyview.com, where its news, sports, obituaries and community coverage are posted for readers in Bad Axe, Port Austin, Caseville, Harbor Beach, Sebewaing, Pigeon, Ubly and the county's townships, as well as for the seasonal residents and former residents who follow Thumb news from elsewhere.
