DAYTON — Two women with some experience as correspondents have stepped up to take key roles at the Dayton Leader, ensuring that the small Webster County city will still have its own newspaper.

Justine Hemmestad and Courtney Sogard took over operation of the paper 48 hours before its Sept. 7 edition was published.

Hemmestad and her husband, Shawn, are now the co-owners of the paper. She is also its editor. Sogard is the managing editor.

Both Sogard and Justine Hemmestad had written for the paper previously.

The Hemmestads purchased the paper from Nelson Media Co., of St. Ansgar, in a deal that closed during the first week of September.

Justine Hemmestad said Nelson Media Co. bought the paper one year ago and then recently offered it for sale. When no one else appeared to be interested in buying it, the Hemmestads bought it.

“We needed a newspaper for our community,” she said. “We couldn’t bear to see Dayton without any newspaper.”

Going from writing some articles to being responsible for production of the entire weekly newspaper has been a big challenge. Justine Hemmestad and Sogard credited Kendra Breitspecher, who founded the paper about 10 years ago as a mostly online publication, with giving them crucial help and advice.

There has been strong public support for the new newspaper team so far.

“There’s been such support for our newspaper,” Justine Hemmestad said.

She said people are coming to her, even at high school football games, and giving her story ideas.

“They want to support us as a newspaper,” she said.

She added that because she and Sogard are local, they are “peers with everybody in our community.”

“We’re printing to them,” she said. “We’re writing to them. We’re reporting what is close to their hearts.’

That kind of local connection was missing when Nelson Media owned the paper, according to Sogard.

“They just didn’t nurture their community,” she said.

She added that there was a “lack of coverage of small town living.”

Sogard and the Hemmestads plan to remedy that shortcoming by covering Dayton and all the towns in the Southeast Valley Community School District, including Burnside, Lehigh, Boxholm, Harcourt, Gowrie and Farnhamville.

One of their goals is to set up a program with Southeast Valley High School in which students could learn journalism in a hands-on way by working with the Dayton Leader. Details of that program are being discussed with school district officials.

For a few years, Dayton had two newspapers. The Dayton Review was established in 1877 and published until 2017. The last few years of its existence overlapped with the early years of the Dayton Leader.