About

the Tri-Community newspaper
A weekly publication of The Tri-Community Newspaper Group LLC
ISSN: Pending

Primary phone number and tip line (734) 668-1200

United States Mail and Shipments to
45601 S Interstate 94 SE #2225 Belleville, MI 48112
United States of America

Editor and Publisher
Dell Deaton

This newspaper is based in and adds value to the tripartite, “local” community of the City of Belleville (population 3,874 per 2024 intercensal), Sumpter Township (11,269), and the Charter Township of Van Buren (29,813), in Wayne County, Michigan. The total number of Occupied Housing Units is 18,471 for our “Tri-Community.” the Tri-Community is currently distributed through local newspaper spaces roughly equidistant throughout the three core municipalities, and is made available free-of-charge based upon operating costs having been covered by advertising revenues.

Reporting is based on the highest legal and ethical standards. It is in no way influenced by relationships with advertisers, individuals, or others. References to advisors, enterprises, entertainment, industry gatherings, I.P.s, investments, museums, persons, places, restaurants, et cetera, do not imply endorsement, solicitation, acceptance, barters, or any other sort of “arrangement” for influence or otherwise.

Published each Friday except on holidays, in which cases edition dates may be adjusted by publisher.

Positioning and Approach

In a desktop computer-based layout, post-Internet, artificial intelligence-deployed media landscape, “newspapers” have come to be largely viewed as  anachronistic at best, dismissed as irrelevant at worst. Specific to “community” newspapers, the question of “How local is local enough?” is in flux.

The governing principles for content consideration on pages of the Tri-Community is that it be enriching to its defined readership base and that it be unique.

Reference as most recent predecessor Saline Journal, which was dedicated the the somewhat larger geography made up of the City of Saline (9,200), Lodi Township (6,400), Pittsfield Township (39,800), and Saline Township (2,300) — meaning a combined total of 57,700 people, versus the approximately 45,000 in The Tri-Community. Throughout its five-year run, that online property was both well-read and financially profitable in what was then a three-source market (that included one ink-on-paper weekly).

By design, the Tri-Community newspaper does not re-post current content online. SEO has no value to its reach, and, as a business matter, simply commoditizes its original reporting and compromises the aspects of “reading a newspaper” that are part-and-parcel of any such property. The purposes of this website, then, are accountability and to provide ease-of-access to supplemental references that are not best-fit for physical, time-constrained media.

Supplemental Remarks

My name is Dell Deaton, founding editor and publisher of the Tri-Community newspaper. The highlight on my name immediately above links to my separate all-aspects (public) URL website “about me,” along with providing a feel for what I bring to my work as a journalist.

As I prepared to launch the Tri-Community, my wife reminded me that I had become clear in my perception that the combined Belleville, Sumpter, Van Buren audience needed a new newspaper while covering the 2018 FIRST Robotics Championship in Detroit for Saline Journal.

Out of respect for the status quo, I deferred and allowed matters to run their course. (Though, as one of the preparations for the inevitable day to come, I defaulted my photojournalism licensing feed to black and white: In my view, that continues to be the most appropriate way to run images in any authentic newspaper and how I’d planned to go with a planned d2 Journal.)

That said, the Tri-Community has not “picked-up” where any other effort has “left off.”

It is not successor to the Belleville Enterprise, which deftly facilitated record of our local oral history while it was still available to be recorded, during its debut year in 1976. Nor does it seek to rest on laurels of my own start as a wire contributor eight years after theirs. First and foremost, this Tri-Community deserves better than anything that has come before now; it should have its own, modern, all-community newspaper.

That’s why we’re here.

Updated July 25, 2026

Post Script

The layout of this website is dictated by the place it is set to serve in back of the newspaper I.P. itself.