Platte County's oldest newspaper changes hands Tuesday, to a reporter who started there

The last time The Platte County Landmark changed owners, it was 2002. Ivan Foley had already worked there twenty years, since May 1982, when he and his wife Linda bought the paper they would run for the next twenty-four. On Tuesday, September 1, it changes hands again.

The buyer is Stacy Wiedmaier, and if the name is familiar from the Landmark’s own pages, that is because she has been writing them: she was a Landmark reporter from 2006 to 2008 while a student at Park University in Parkville, and her byline is in this week’s edition. The announcement ran Thursday, August 27, in what the paper calls the Foleys’ final edition. Her first as publisher is Wednesday, September 2.

What is confirmed

Everything in this section comes from the paper’s own announcement and from Foley’s final column, and we are treating a newspaper’s report on its own sale as a primary document, because it is the parties speaking for themselves.

• The Landmark was founded in 1865. The paper says it has never missed a weekly edition in those 161 years, which would make it one of the longest continuously published newspapers west of the Mississippi.
• Ownership transfers September 1, 2026. The sales contract was signed the week of the announcement. No price was disclosed, and we have not asked for one yet. This is a private sale between private parties.
• Foley retires from the newspaper business after 44 years at the same paper. So does Cindy Rinehart, the office manager, after 34 years; Foley writes that hiring her in 1992, after she walked in unannounced, was the best decision he made there.
• Wiedmaier grew up in St. Joseph, reported for the Landmark from 2006 to 2008, later worked at The Desert Sun, the Gannett daily in Palm Springs, California, and moved back to the area with her husband in July 2026.
• The deal was four years in the making. Per the paper, she first raised the idea of buying the Landmark “whenever he was ready to retire” during a Thanksgiving visit in 2022. Foley writes that he told almost no one until this week: his wife, Rinehart, columnist Guy Speckman and his lawyer.

What the paper says about itself

These are the Landmark’s own figures, printed in the announcement. We have no reason to doubt them and no independent way, today, to confirm them, so they get their own section.

• Largest paid circulation of any printed newspaper in Platte County.
• A Facebook page drawing 1.5 to 2 million views a month, which the paper calls the largest audience of any Northland publication.
• Dozens of Missouri Press Association Better Newspaper Contest awards, and, for Foley personally, the 2016 Tom and Pat Gish Award from the Institute for Rural Journalism, a national prize for courage and tenacity in rural reporting. That one is an outside institution’s judgment rather than the paper’s own.

Why a sale in Platte City is a Kansas City story

Two weeks ago this newspaper noted that The Kansas City Call, the city’s Black newspaper since 1919, had missed a weekly edition without explanation. Last week we noted that The Beacon and KBIA won a national Murrow Award for investigative work. Local news in this metro is being decided one building at a time, and the outcomes go both ways.

This one went the good way, and the people closest to it said so plainly. Columnist Chris Kamler, in his own farewell to Foley: “I am THRILLED the paper wasn’t sold to some out of town interest or company.” Kamler put the whole worry about small newspapers in one sentence: that the buyer turns out to be a chain that keeps the name and closes the office. Here the buyer is a former reporter who moved back to the county to do it, and Foley’s own line on her is the one a reader should hold him to: “she is familiar with our style of aggressive news coverage focusing on accountability journalism.”

A word on our stake, because you should know it: The Stare reads the Landmark every week, and its reporting is in our files — Wiedmaier’s Platte County accountability work included. We are not a neutral party to whether her paper keeps doing that kind of reporting. We would like it to.

What changes, and what doesn’t, on Tuesday

Foley is explicit that he is retiring from newspapers, not from talking. He and Speckman, who is also filing his last column after six years, plan a podcast; Foley’s own description of it is “information, conversation and smartassery.” Speckman on Foley, in his goodbye: “He did so without fear. That’s a whole lot harder than it looks.”

The paper’s historic home at 252 Main Street in Platte City, which the Foleys restored in 2008–09 and won a preservation award for, was sold to the David Barth family in 2023; the newsroom has operated from 212 Marshall Road since. “Between the Lines,” the column Foley started in 1993 and wrote weekly from 1999, ends with this edition. “It’s best to cut this thing off cold turkey,” he writes.

What’s next: ownership transfers Tuesday, September 1. Wiedmaier’s first edition is Wednesday, September 2. The first honest measure of a newspaper sale is whether the paper that shows up a month later still reads like the one Kamler and Speckman were describing. We’ll check on October 2.