Meier, Judy Winter, 61, passed away Sunday, October 9, 2011, in Borrego Springs, CA. Born Judy Ann Winter in Hoisington, Kansas, she was raised in Wichita and was a Kansan until moving to Borrego Springs in the 1970’s. Judy was the editor of the Borrego Sun for more than 2 decades, and was dedicated to the newspaper and the desert community she loved. She is survived by her son Travis (Britany) Meier and daughter Whitney Meier, all of Redlands, CA, mother Martha Ann Winter of Wichita, KS, and brothers Chris Winter of San Francisco, CA, Rex (Nan) Winter of Chaska, MN, and Rick Winter of Flower Mound, TX. She was preceded in death by her father, Harold R Winter, Sr. Private family service to be held followed by burial at White Chapel Memorial Gardens in Wichita. 
In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorials to the Judy Winter Meier Fund at the Borrego Springs Bank, PO Box 866, Borrego Springs, CA 92004.

I never met Judy Winter Meier, the editor of the biweekly Borrego Sun, but she was a sister in ink-stained arms, and I won’t let her death pass unremarked.

The hard-news headline is that Meier, 61, died in terrible circumstances, but the deck head should reflect what an outsize role journalists play in out-of-the-way towns.

The truth is, if you injected truth serum into daily metropolitan journalists, a significant percentage would confess a romantic desire to flee the big city and devote their lives to running a weekly that little towns cannot well survive without.

Yes, many of us long to return to the old school, churning out copy on manual typewriters, as Meier reportedly did. Many of us would love to edit a newspaper that doesn’t ring its own death knell by giving its hard-won news away for free on the Internet.

For small-town editors, the money’s not great. The hours punishing. But nondaily journalists are as fundamental to the community as the deputy on the beat, the doctor at the clinic, the teacher in the school. They’re pillars that can lean to the right or the left but, every week or two weeks or month, they hold up their end of a time-honored civic bargain.

A remote town without its own newspaper is missing a vital strand of DNA. In a sense, newspapers are more essential out there in the hinterland than they are in a metropolis where the competition for advertising dollars is intense among metastasizing media outlets.

Meier’s credo, according to the Los Angeles Times, was as old school as hot type and a green eyeshade: "Get your facts, get ‘em quick and get ‘em accurate."

By all accounts, Meier played it down the journalistic middle during her long tenure as Sun editor, a position that gave her personal power among neighbors, a power she handled with care.

Meier "was very respectful of the private lives of Borregans in that we live in a small town," said Betsy Knaak, director of the Anza-Borrego Desert Natural History Museum.

The Sun under Meier’s leadership wasn’t a desert muckraker hot to kick up sandstorms. Not the Sun’s style. But neither was it a shameless Chamber of Commerce-style booster that avoided bad news.

In the Sun’s Sept. 29 edition, the banner headline reads: "Principal Iglesias resigns; school starts recruiting process."

An inside story with photograph of boys in canoes leads: "Boy Scouts from Troop 696 of Borrego Springs received rank and merit badges at a court of honor ceremony Sept. 10 at Mataguay Scout Ranch near Lake Henshaw."

In the "Crimewatch" section, an identified local woman was sentenced to three years’ probation and a year of home detention after pleading guilty to collecting her father’s Social Security and pension checks for nine years after this death.

In their own ways, each of these stories are indispensable "Hey, Marthas" in Borrego — but no place else.

No question, some weeklies can be as eccentric as the towns they serve. They can be the butts of jokes.

Annie Proulx’s "The Shipping News" is a fictional case in point. Here’s a risible snippet of dialogue as an old hand, Billy, schools a new reporter in the art of small-town journalism. The two newspapermen are sitting in a car on the Newfoundland coast:

Billy: It’s finding the center of your story, the beating heart of it, that’s what makes a reporter. You have to start by making up some headlines. You know: short, punchy, dramatic headlines. Now, have a look (out the windshield), what do you see? Tell me the headline.

Quoyle: Horizon Fills With Dark Clouds?

Billy: Imminent Storm Threatens Village!

Quoyle: But what if no storm comes?

Billy: Village Spared From Deadly Storm.

Under the longtime ownership of the Copley Press — and, since 2009, Patrick Meehan, a part-time British resident — Meier reported the news as straight as a ramrod, wrote the headlines, edited the copy of a staff you could count on a hand lacking two fingers, typed editorials and columns about issues great and (usually) small, laid the pages out and no doubt delivered the newspaper if need be.

In short, she preserved a cultural institution in a league with the hospital or the library.

Recently, I was asked at an Escondido Rotary Club meeting about the future of newspapers.

My reflexive answer was that newspapers as we know them are an endangered species. It’s anyone’s guess when the last print newspaper will be sold.

It could be 10 or 20 years. We just don’t know how long it will take for the centuries-long habit of newsprint to be completely eclipsed by newer, cheaper forms of news delivery.

No one can predict when that last newspaper will arrive on the porch or in the mailbox, but you can bet your iPad on this:

The last printed newspaper will look and read a lot more like the Borrego Sun than The New York Times.