Three Lakes News
Overview
The Three Lakes News is a weekly newspaper serving Three Lakes, Wisconsin, a town in Oneida County in the state's Northwoods, and the lake country of Vilas and northern Oneida counties around it. Established in 1931, it has for most of its life been published in harness with the Vilas County News-Review of Eagle River — first as a paper printed by the News-Review, then in a combined edition, and in its modern form as a companion Wednesday weekly produced by the same Eagle River newsroom. Its masthead today carries the Multi Media Channels publishing group, and its publisher of record in recent years has been Kurt Krueger of the News-Review. For a community built on lakes, resorts and second homes, the News has been the local paper of record for more than ninety years.
Newspapers in Early Three Lakes
Three Lakes had journalism before it had the News. A county history of Lincoln, Oneida and Vilas counties records that about 1888 or 1889 a man named Iver Anderson published a very small weekly sheet in Three Lakes called the Three Lakes Echo, which had a brief existence. A more ambitious attempt came from W. J. Neu, who had published Forest Leaves in Crandon and moved it to Three Lakes about 1892, holding the Forest County printing with Sam Shaw. When Three Lakes became a village of Oneida County in 1897, Neu moved the paper back to Crandon, returned two years later, and in 1909 started the Forest Advance in Three Lakes — a single sheet he enlarged to an eight-page paper after it was admitted to the mails, operating it for several years. These fragile frontier ventures, dependent on homestead notices and job printing, were the predecessors the News eventually replaced with a more durable model: production by an established county newspaper.
Founding in 1931 Under the News-Review
The Three Lakes News began as a weekly on December 3, 1931, published by the Vilas County News-Review of Eagle River, according to the Guide to Wisconsin Newspapers. The arrangement gave Three Lakes a paper backed by the plant and staff of the county seat weekly of neighboring Vilas County, whose own lineage ran back to Eagle River's first newspaper, the Vindicator, established in the 1880s by Patrick O'Brien. The original Three Lakes News ran under this arrangement until September 12, 1963, when the Guide records it as merged with the Vilas County News-Review to form the combined Vilas County News-Review and Three Lakes News. Echo Media's profile of the publications likewise dates the Three Lakes News to 1931 and the News-Review to 1886, and describes the two publications as combined in 1972 — the same year the North Woods Trader shopper was established — serving Vilas and northern Oneida counties from Eagle River.
The Combined Edition Years
For decades, Three Lakes readers received their local news within the combined Vilas County News-Review and Three Lakes News, published every Wednesday from Eagle River. The combined paper's masthead described it as a consolidation of the Vilas County News, the Eagle River Review and the Three Lakes News, a member of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association and the National Newspaper Association, entered as periodical mail at Eagle River. The formula was the standard Northwoods survival strategy: one newsroom, one press and one advertising staff producing a county paper strong enough to carry the smaller community's news as a distinct title within it. Three Lakes news — town government, school, lakes associations, resorts, churches and the summer colony — appeared under its own nameplate inside a paper whose center of gravity was the Vilas County seat fifteen miles north.
A Separate Three Lakes News Again
The Guide to Wisconsin Newspapers also records a distinct Three Lakes News weekly running from 1979 onward, and the modern paper's own postal statement fits that revival: the present Three Lakes News is entered as periodical mail at the post office in Three Lakes under an act of April 23, 1980, with its own publication number, separate from the News-Review's. Subscriptions are mailed to the Three Lakes News at its own Three Lakes post office box, while editorial production remains in Eagle River. A recent masthead lists Multi Media Channels chief executive Patrick J. Wood, regional management, Publisher Kurt Krueger for both the News-Review and the Three Lakes News, editor Doug Etten, assistant editors, a sports editor and a shared production staff — one newsroom issuing two Wednesday weeklies, each with its own community nameplate. The annual subscription prices on that masthead were sixty dollars within Vilas and Oneida counties and seventy-two dollars elsewhere in Wisconsin or out of state.
Kurt Krueger and the Eagle River Newsroom
Kurt Krueger, publisher of the News-Review, has been the figure most consistently associated with the Three Lakes News in recent decades; the Wisconsin Blue Book's 2015–16 news media listings already showed the Three Lakes News as a Wednesday paper under Krueger, published from Eagle River. The Eagle River newsroom's coverage of Three Lakes is the paper's reason for existing: town and school board meetings, lake district and lake association affairs, road and land use questions in a town where much of the land is water or forest, the resort and real estate economy, and the obituaries, legal notices and real estate transfers that fill a Northwoods weekly's inside pages. The shared staff also produces the North Woods Trader, giving the Three Lakes News a shopper companion as part of the same Eagle River operation.
The End of Printing in Eagle River, 2019
In the autumn of 2019 the News-Review announced the end of nearly 135 years of newspaper printing in Eagle River. The Vilas County News-Review and the Three Lakes News would be printed by Adams Publishing Group in Janesville starting with the November 6 issue, after the local plant of Wisconsin-Michigan Publishers — the company formed in 1972 by Eagle River owners Dan and Bob Satran with the help of state bonding, which at its height printed six local newspapers including the News-Review, the Three Lakes News, the Tomahawk Leader, the Lakeland Times and Michigan papers — closed. Publisher Kurt Krueger explained that the move to a more modern facility would provide more full-color capability than the local press could offer, a change that required earlier news and advertising deadlines but did not change arrival times: papers would still reach newsstands Tuesday afternoons and subscribers on Wednesdays. The episode captures the modern economics of the Northwoods weekly — editorial work stays local, while printing migrates to a distant regional plant.
Ownership: Wisconsin-Michigan Publishers to Multi Media Channels
The Three Lakes News's recent ownership follows its Eagle River parent. The Satran brothers' Wisconsin-Michigan Publishers printed the paper for decades; the News-Review was later sold to the Delphos Herald company in 1984, in the sequence the paper's own plant-closing history recounts, and the publications passed in time to Multi Media Channels, the Waupaca-based, Wood family community newspaper group whose name appears on current News-Review and Three Lakes News mastheads and whose websites carry the papers at vcnewsreview.com. The Three Lakes News is distributed digitally through the same channel, with its print edition continuing as a Wednesday weekly for Three Lakes subscribers.
The Community It Serves
Three Lakes is a community whose year-round population is small beside its summer population, set in the chain-of-lakes country that gives the town its name, at the southern edge of the readership the News-Review group serves. A paper for such a place must serve two publics at once: the residents who staff its town government, school and churches, and the seasonal families whose connection to Three Lakes is renewed each summer and maintained through the paper the rest of the year — one reason the out-of-area subscription price matters in a Northwoods paper's rate card. Legal notices, lake news, town meetings and school sports are the staples; the News's longevity since 1931, through merger, revival and changes of owner and printer, is the measure of how durable that staple diet remains.
Place in Northwoods Journalism
The Three Lakes News is an instructive example of the satellite weekly: a community title too small to sustain a full plant of its own, kept alive for ninety years by being attached to a stronger county newspaper — first by ownership, then by consolidation, then as a revived companion edition. Its history is inseparable from the Vilas County News-Review's, and the pair illustrate how the Northwoods, with its scattered population, has preserved more mastheads than its population alone would predict, by sharing everything except the nameplate and the local news itself.
Directory Facts
The Three Lakes News is a weekly newspaper published for Three Lakes, Oneida County, Wisconsin, United States, produced by the Vilas County News-Review newsroom in Eagle River. It was established on December 3, 1931, published by the News-Review; the original run merged into the combined Vilas County News-Review and Three Lakes News, and a distinct Three Lakes News weekly has been published since 1979. It appears on Wednesdays under publisher Kurt Krueger within the Multi Media Channels group.
