Dutch community newspaper "The Windmill Herald" to Fold

LANGLEY, BC - Red ink  is hastening the demise of Langley-based Dutch community newspaper The Windmill Herald, news which will reverberate throughout Canada and the United States as its May 10 issue gets delivered to its coast-to-coast readership. Publisher Albert van der Heide expects to publish the newspaper's final regular issue on June 11.

The paper which is published twice-a-month dipped increasingly into red ink as the Canadian dollar moved to parity with its U.S. counterpart and as postal rates and technological upgrading costs kept inching upwards.

"We were able to slow the effects of a nearly inevitable greying readership with an English-language section in The Windmill Herald," said Albert van der Heide who purchased the paper in 1969, five years after coming to Canada as a teenager. "We keep hearing from grandchildren of 1950s Dutch immigrants interested in their heritage and roots, but not enough to sustain the paper in its current format," he said.

On balance, the soon-to-be former publisher experienced the rise of the Internet as a significant help. "With easy access, it stimulated interest in Dutch heritage, genealogy and even every-day news in the Netherlands, often prompting people to order a mail subscription," Van der Heide said. On the flipside, the paper lost most of its travel industry advertising revenue, he noted.

Van der Heide's publishing company, which also operates an online bookstore GoDutch.com, offers subscribers their pick of books to settle any unused portion of prepaid subscriptions. He also offers his paid-up readers a choice from three titles as a Thank You and Farewell gift to, what he calls, "an amazingly loyal and supportive group of subscribers."