Cheney-based Free Press Publishing Inc. has acquired two rural Eastern Washington newspapers within the past month.

Last month, the company, which publishes the Cheney Free Press weekly newspaper, acquired the Odessa Record. On March 1, the company acquired the Whitman County Gazette. Both newspapers also are published weekly.

Free Press Publishing owner Roger Harnack says the previous owner of the Odessa Record, Terrie Schmidt-Crosby, is planning to retire and had approached Harnack about acquiring the publication. Free Press Publishing agreed to the transaction and brought the Record in-house. The company hired the previous Odessa Record editor to a part-time position and retained the newspaper’s other two staff members.

Harnack says the acquisition of the Whitman County Gazette has been in the works for a while, as the publisher of that publication, Gordon Forgey, prepares to retire.

“As I understand it, he’d talked to some different people that were interested in, more or less, his subscriber database, but not in keeping the newspaper alive,” Harnack says. “We used to print them, so we knew the newspaper very well.”

Harnack says all nine of the Gazette’s employees are staying on.

Harnack declines to disclose terms of the two transactions, but he says he’s looking for other opportunities to acquire newspapers.

“We have press capacity available, so we’d like to pull a couple more community newspapers into our group,” Harnack says. “The economy of scale will allow us to operate them without having to cut back (their) staff.”

With the acquisitions, Free Press Publishing now owns eight newspapers in four Eastern Washington counties: Whitman, Lincoln, Spokane, and Adams.

Harnack says that with the acquisition of the Odessa Record, Free Press Publishing covers most of Lincoln County; the company also owns the Davenport Times and the Ritzville-Adams County Journal.

Outside of Lincoln County, Free Press Publishing owns the Cheney Free Press, the Fairchild Flyer, the West Plains Extra, and the Spokane Valley News Herald.

Many newspapers in Eastern Washington are owned by companies headquartered outside of Washington state, he says.

“By pulling these in and being an Eastern Washington-owned and operated company, we actually retain our own voice,” Harnack says. “Our newspapers reflect the character of our towns. If we’re not there to do it, these newspapers disappear — you lose a lot of your culture and heritage.”