Every week, Milo Miller is in charge of publishing a paper. Instead of relying on a newsroom full of beat reporters and columnists, his paper The Budget looks to handwritten letters from across the country.
“These would be letters that came today,” he said as he leafed through a basket of letters. “[There’s] Williamsburg, Kentucky; Millersburg, Ohio; Rexford Montana…”
The contents of each piece of snail mail will be printed in the next edition of the weekly paper and distributed across the country to tens of thousands of readers.
Ohio has lost more than half of its daily and weekly news publications between 2005 and 2025, according to data from Medill’s Local News Initiative.
But the Budget is finding success by staying exactly the same.
“We're kind of part of that culture. Part of the Amish story is The Budget,” he said.
The Budget’s start
The Budget was founded in 1890 by John C. Miller, an Amish Mennonite who wrote a column on what was happening in Sugarcreek’s community. He printed it and mailed it to family around the U.S. – who wrote back.
He decided to publish those letters too.
“Then all these letters started coming in. And by the end of that first year, there were over a hundred scribes from 12 different states.”
It quickly became a national publication.
More than 100 years later, it’s sticking to that 19th-century model. Every Wednesday, they publish around 70 pages of letters from Amish communities who still rely on print and old school word-of-mouth to share their news.
Today, the Budget has around 1,200 writers who document their daily lives through letters sent to Ohio.
“It’s funny to look back at some of the first letters you know in 1890. Outside of maybe a few words that would be trendy at the time, if you read that letter it doesn't look much different than today's letter,” he said.
The process
For the past four years, Budget staff member Brenda Keller has taken these reports on crops, births and deaths and transcribed them from sweeping cursive into bold typeface that’s distributed as far as Washington state.
As she typed up one letter, Keller described it as pretty typical of what she’s seen over her tenure.
“They're just going to visit people and having church,” she said. “That's the norm.”
Unlike a traditional publication, there’s little editorial oversight at The Budget. Miller and his staff do some light copy editing and remove anything political or controversial: No debates over church rules. No endorsements of one sect over another.
But mostly, Miller prints the news just as it comes in – funny hunting stories, weather gripes and all.
“We're their form of entertainment. We're their nightly news. … They're not turning on the television or going to YouTube or going on TikTok or whatever to figure out what's trending, what's going on, what's happening in the world. In a lot of cases, they're reading it in The Budget,” Miller said.
Trust and tradition
The Amish and Anabaptist aversion to modern technology has kept The Budget’s circulation steady for years.
It has 20,000 paid subscribers. Miller expects that to grow with the Amish population, which approximately doubles every two decades.
“Our struggles are not on the financial end, it's the distribution model with the United States Postal Service. Presses are becoming fewer and fewer, where we're driving seven hours away to print,” he said.
Even with the long drive, Miller will keep The Budget an internet-free publication.
He may use a computer, but most of The Budget’s audience does not. Flipping through its pages has become a ritual for the community, steeped in tradition.
“It’s their newspaper. We're just privileged enough to publish it for them.”
