The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

DAYTON - After half a decade of being a colorful literary presence on news- stands and in mail boxes around the Touchet Valley, the monthly Blue Mountain News has ceased to exist, the publisher of the popular news magazine recently con- firmed.

"After five years, all three of us were ready to move on," owner and publisher Ken Graham said about himself, advertising representative Tanya Patton and designer/ graphic artist Vanessa Heim.

Even before the maga- zine lost two of its anchor advertisers, the staff had dis- cussed stopping its monthly (10 times a year) press run so they each could pursue other interests, said Graham, who decided in November to make the January issue of the Blue Mountain News its last.

The trio considered creating a news website using its brand name for calendar items and news briefs, but decided against it in March, he said. In early June, Graham took a part-time job as a reporter for the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, covering Columbia, Garfield and rural Walla Walla counties.

Graham founded the Blue Mountain News in March of 2007 because "I felt it was something that was needed," he said. "A lot of people en- couraged me to do it."

At first, the free magazine circulated mostly in Columbia County, and then Graham began sending it to residents of Waitsburg and Prescott as well.

Graham, who at the time was a real estate broker who had just sold Blue Mountain Realtors to Blaine Bickelhaupt, had no particular background in journalism, but introduced a more in- depth kind of news coverage and feature writing that was well received by area readers and advertisers. He modeled the magazine after urban weeklies such as the Seattle Weekly and the Spokane In- lander.

Patton joined him as writ- er, editor and ad sales rep- resentative by the second edition. Heim injected her eye-catching design a year later and the magazine that reached some 5,500 readers in the valley became a coffee table institution.

Graham, who has a master's degree in economics, continued to teach the subject online for Phoenix Univer- sity while running the maga- zine, but last year he began to feel burned out by the monthly magazine produc- tion crunch. By the two big advertisers left, "we didn't have the gumption to step up and replace them," he said. "It was a personal decision for the three of us. We had a lot of other things going on in our lives."

Some of the magazine's advertising clients seemed receptive to the creation of a Blue Mountain News web- site, but there was also a fair amount of skepticism as to how it would catch on among users and its development would have requirement an investment Graham said he wasn't willing to make.

A big advocate for the area's wind energy projects and an editorial backer of certain political candidates, the Blue Mountain News' take on issues made an im- pact, Graham said.

"I felt like we made a dif- ference," he said. "I learned a lot and I had a lot of fun."

The magazine co-founded the Touchet River Valley visitor's guide with the Times in 2011 and handed over control of that publication to the Times' holding company, Touchet Valley Publishing, earlier this year. Touchet Val- ley Publishing plans to con- tinue putting out spring/summer and fall/winter guides for the area.