Exactly 111 years after it started, the San Juan Record — the weekly newspaper for San Juan County in southeastern Utah — has published its last print edition.

The weekly edition that went out to subscribers on Wednesday is the paper’s last. The first issue of the Record was published on Sept. 30, 1915.

Bill Boyle, who identifies himself as “publisher and editor and janitor” at the paper for the last 33 years, said Wednesday that the paper has faced higher costs for its print edition — printing it in Santa Fe, New Mexico, plus transportation, postage and delivery — and needed to make a change.

The Record will continue to operate its news website, sjrnews.com, and will continue to read the news on its radio station, Redrock 92.7, weekday mornings at 9 a.m., Boyle said.

Boyle estimated the Record’s weekly print edition had some 4,500 readers, while the website draws hundreds of thousands from southeastern Utah, the neighboring Four Corners area and beyond.

A web-focused news outlet will allow the Record’s staff — six full-time employees and between 15 and 20 part-time contributors — to get breaking news to its readers and online subscribers, Boyle said.

“We had a school closure because of flooding a couple of weeks ago,” Boyle said.

It happened on a Wednesday night, after the weekly print edition had already been sent out.

“We were able to cover it on our radio the next morning, and we updated it on our website, but it didn’t come out in the paper until the next Wednesday,” he noted.

The San Juan Record’s history — which the paper referenced in a column Wednesday — started with Oscar W. McConkie, a Mona native who moved from Moab to Monticello in 1915 with his wife, Margaret, and their infant son, Bruce.

Margaret was from Monticello, and the family moved there shortly after Oscar had dropped out of the University of Michigan’s law school. According to the paper, his eyesight made studying difficult, but after a few years of publishing in Utah, his eyesight improved and he returned to school, eventually becoming a judge in San Juan County.

Oscar’s sons rose to Utah prominence: Bruce R. McConkie was named an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1972, and served until his death in 1985. His younger son, Oscar Jr., co-founded Utah’s biggest law firm, Kirton McConkie, in 1964.

Boyle said the San Juan Record joins “a pretty distinguished list” of newspapers that have cut their print output. (The Salt Lake Tribune, for example, stopped daily print publication in 2021, and now publishes two print editions a week.)

“We are not going out of business,” Boyle stressed. “We are making an adjustment, a needed adjustment, and hope that our readers and advertisers will support us in it.”