Bromer, who lives in nearby Marietta, was standing in his office, a chilly second-floor room in his parents' 1830s farmhouse in southwestern Lancaster County.
``It's the one room we've never restored,'' he said.
Paint was peeling from the walls; the bare wood floors creaked; there were no curtains on the six-over-six windowpanes. It was clearly a room out of another century - except for the desktop computer and printer, with which Bromer had been having a little bang-your-head-against-the-wall problem.
For the next issue, he said with a smile, ``we might do something about the Luddites.''
The dictionary definition of a Luddite: ``Any of a group of workers in England (1811-16) who smashed new, labor-saving textile machinery in protest . . . a person opposed in principle to technological change.''
Since 1989, Bromer and his parents have been turning out Old News from his parents' 25-acre hay farm near the Susquehanna River.
The paper is written and edited entirely by Bromer, his parents and their friends - no freelancers need apply.
At first a monthly, it now appears nine times a year, allowing a two-month summer respite and a one-month midwinter breather.
Who's the audience?
``Anybody who's interested in history,'' Bromer said as the family's friendly Labrador nuzzled a stranger.
``We get lists of people who buy something similar - like American Heritage.''
There are 33,282 subscribers, the October issue reported, a growing audience for Old News' history - with a dash of whimsy.
``Christopher Columbus Is Dead,'' headlined the June 1991 issue.
A good story is always worth holding a day or two.
* ``It's all my husband's fault,'' said Nancy Bromer, the publisher of Old News.
After living in Manhattan and North Tarrytown - the playwright Horton Foote was a good friend - Richard and Nancy Bromer and their three children returned to Lancaster County in 1970.
Nancy Bromer, who is in her 70s, was born in Paradise. She and Richard met while they were swimming in the Susquehanna.
Richard Bromer was a corporation psychologist and hadn't touched journalism since writing for the student newspaper at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, from which he graduated in 1942. But the elder Bromer had always hankered to run a smalltown paper.
``We had moved into the country,'' Nancy Bromer recalled, ``and my husband began to make country newspaper noises.''
In the early 1970s, the Bromers began a weekly newspaper, the Susquehanna Times, which failed while Richard Bromer was teaching psychology at what is now Millersville University.
They began a monthly, Susquehanna Magazine, which, she said, ``was perking along pretty nicely'' until it ran into the blizzard of advertising cutbacks of the late 1980s.
``We slid from a little local newspaper with interesting bits of history write-ups,'' she said, ``to the same thing in a regional magazine . . . when we slid over to Old News - the whole world.''
The name, the subject matter, the very idea of the publication all resulted from a fluke.
There they were in 1989, sitting around a table in the farmhouse.
``My son Rick was putting together a layout for promoting Susquehanna Magazine,'' she said, ``and he had put it in tabloid format and he had put across the top Old News.'' A space filler, until someone could think of a real headline for the magazine promotion.
``And we looked at it and said, `That does it, we're in a new business.'
``We could instantly see this. We are no longer regional. We can write about anything. Circulate it anywhere.
``And,'' without any advertising, on which the magazine had depended, she said, ``it has worked very well.''
As an educational publication?
``No,'' she said. ``We thought of it as an entertainment device, to tell you the truth.
``My own feeling is we get a good response to it because people can feel they're being entertained and educated at the same time.
``They come away feeling a little smarter.''
* Old News isn't a send-up.
The October issue devoted its first three full pages to the 1066 Norman invasion of Britain, with photos of the Bayeux Tapestry documenting the Battle of Hastings.
And at the end of the story, the sources from which the story was drawn were cited, as were the sources for each story.
Publishing out of a farmhouse - well, the final product is printed at a newspaper plant in Ephrata - but not a bunch of farmers publishing.
The Bromers did try raising baby bulls for bologna meat in the 1970s and 1980s, she said, but ``we lost a lot of money at it.''
Now they rent their 25 acres to ``a neighbor, a serious farmer.''
So did her son, the editor, ever work on a newspaper?
``He worked on the school paper'' at Lehman College in New York City, she said, but that was all the journalism he had absorbed before working on the family's publications.
Majored in journalism in college?
``Something really useful,'' she said, with a chuckle, ``like English, philosophy.''
Sounds good.
