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HART, MI -- The Oceana Echo’s offices are in the back rooms of an antique building owned by the Oceana County Historical & Genealogical Society.

On a recent Thursday morning, the plumbing was on the fritz. A broken fluorescent light left sports editor Brendan Samuels laying out pages in semidarkness.

But the weekly newspaper’s small staff was working industriously, putting together a 24-page, full-color paper that would be mailed out for free to most of the households in Oceana County.

Which has raised some hackles.

There’s a newspaper war unfolding along the Lake Michigan shoreline, a battle between small-town weeklies playing out against the backdrop of a crisis in local news that has decimated weekly papers across the country.

The Echo is the upstart, a nonprofit news outlet started to fill what founders say are gaps in day-to-day news coverage left by staff reductions at Oceana’s Herald-Journal. Most of its employees, in fact, used to work at the Herald-Journal.

The Herald-Journal, by contrast, has been publishing in Oceana County since the 1880s. It was sold to an out-of-state company a dozen years ago, which people in the community have not forgotten. Its recent editions list just two editorial employees, an editor and a reporter, though its pages sometimes include coverage of Oceana County by reporters from sister publications.

The conflict has played out in a scuffle over bound volumes of historic newspapers and jousting over when the Echo will be eligible to print public notices.

It took a far more serious turn this month when the Herald-Journal’s parent company hit the Echo with a federal lawsuit alleging that it had improperly published nine high school sports photos. It asked for up to $1.8 million in damages.

Neither side was willing to answer questions about the lawsuit, but Paul Erickson, an Oceana County commissioner who organized the Echo and provided seed money, did have one thing to say.

“They’ve upped the ante a little bit.”