Amish paper shuns web, continues to do well in print

The Budget, an Amish newspaper mailed to 20,000 subscribers in Canada and the U.S., decided against going on the Internet, plans to add more reporters to its staff and is generally doing well during the recession, an Associated Press news feature reports.

The AP report noted:

“In a world where news still travels at a mail carrier’s pace, the farmers, preachers and mechanics responsible for filling The Budget threatened to go on strike if the 119-year-old Amish weekly went ahead with its plan to go online…

“The Budget is published in Sugarcreek, an eastern Ohio town of dairy farmers and bricklayers at the heart of the nation’s largest Amish settlement. It was born in 1890 as a series of letters swapped among Amish families who had dispersed across the Midwest.”

The staff of the paper are not Amish, but volunteer “scribes” who “chronicle the fabric of their daily lives, generally writing them by hand and submitting them weekly by mail or fax” are typically Amish.