The 25 percent tariffs President Trump imposed yesterday on imported goods from Canada and Mexico have hit home. Next week, our newspapers, Bayside Gazette and OC Today-Dispatch, will begin to feel the pinch of the tariff on the Canadian newsprint our printer uses for all our products.

In addition to our main publications, this will include our public notices newspaper, Digest, the monthly Real Estate section we publish through our association with the Coastal Association of Realtors, and, if the tariffs extend into spring, the Discover Downtown section we produce in concert with the Ocean City Development Corporation.

Last year, this resulted in a combined annual press run of about 1.7 million papers and somewhere around 62 million individual pages of newsprint rolling off the press. Since paper constitutes 50-70% of the total cost of printing, a price increase is coming our way in seven days regardless of how this tariff is handled by the Canadian producer and our printer.

We were alerted to that Tuesday by our printing company in Dover, Delaware. It cannot yet say how much of an increase we’ll see, because the producer has not told its buyers how much of the tariff it is willing to absorb.

For our part, it is our intent to absorb all of it for as long as we can to help our advertisers. Many of them could be facing their own tariff-related price increases this year — food, paper goods, building materials — and we would rather be part of the solution than a part of the problem.

That’s the beauty of being an independent and “stubbornly local” newspaper company. We can react to the needs of the community while we look for a way to make this work without doing irreparable damage to our own financial circumstances.

Of course, given the political volatility of the situation right now, these tariffs could be gone before this paper even reaches the newsstands. We sincerely hope that happens, but if it doesn’t, we want our customers and supporters to know how we will handle it.