Is The Columbian going to begin a series focusing on local businesses that fail, or is there a reason Torque Coffee and the Palmer family were singled out?
Businesses close for one reason or another every day, and half of all small businesses fail within the first five years. Many of these businesses have debts that will go into default and need to be renegotiated or charged off by the banks that hold the loans, whether they are backed by the Small Business Administration or not.
If the newspaper ran a story, complete with photos of the owners, on each indebted business that closed it would be the modern version of putting them in stocks in the town square. Society moved past public shaming hundreds of years ago. The Columbian should do the same.