Before the Port Townsend & Jefferson County Leader came into circulation in 1889, there were at least 12 other newspapers that had come and gone in the Key City.

Each had their own political slant, style and flashy name (“The Cyclop,” “The Northern Light” and “The Puget Sound Weekly Angus,” for examples), but only one remains.

“Every publisher had the goal to present the best newspaper they could to the community,” author Bill Lindstrom said. “Some of them would tout in their banners that they were the Republican newspaper of Jefferson County. Others would not. There would be a lot of backbiting.”

Lindstrom, who once worked as news editor for Peninsula Daily News, has detailed the histories of the various newspapers that came before, and after The Leader in Port Townsend in his book, “Strait Press: A History of News Media on the North Olympic Peninsula.”

The book, which was commissioned by Brown McClatchy Maloney, owner of the Port Angeles radio station KONP, details the histories of news from Forks to Port Townsend. It tells the stories of the Port Angeles Evening News, the Port Townsend Register and how they transformed over the years until today. It also details the history of radio on the peninsula, including the start of Port Townsend’s own KPTZ.

Lindstrom will give a book talk and signing with a panel of guests, including Scott Wilson, former publisher of The Leader; John Brewer, former publisher of the Peninsula Daily News; and Lloyd Mullen, current publisher of The Leader, at 7 p.m. Feb. 28 at the Port Townsend Community Center.

Lindstrom was on tour for his first history book, called “John Tornow: Villain or Victim,” when Maloney first approached him.

“I said, ‘Am I going to have time to do this?’ And the logical answer would have been ‘No,’” Lindstrom said. “The more I got into it, the more I became enamored with the peninsula newspapers and the families of the newspapers.”

The research turned out to be far more extensive than Lindstrom originally imagined. Living in Aberdeen at the time, he made 52 trips to Olympia in the span of six months, and he spent five to six hours each trip at the state library, where there are archives of every newspaper that has existed in the state.

“This area was always intriguing to me because it just seemed like it was just ongoing news all the time,” Lindstrom said. “It just never stopped. So I knew it was an area that was resplendent with tremendous history.”

While he begins the book with the history of the Port Angeles Evening News, which eventually became Peninsula Daily News, Lindstrom was fascinated with the history of Port Townsend’s newspapers.

“From a writing standpoint, what I really enjoyed was the chapter on Port Townsend,” he said. “I really loved writing that chapter.”

The first documented newspaper here was the Port Townsend Register, which first went to press in 1859. But Lindstrom found that in between the time The Register started and The Leader began its long legacy, each political election brought a newspaper with a different slant.

“That absolutely blew me away,” Lindstrom said. “There were 12 newspapers here before 1889, when The Leader was founded. There’d be a Republican newspaper, then the Democrats would come along and they would have a newspaper. If the Democrats won the election, the paper stayed. If the Democrats lost the election, the paper folded. And, consequently, the existing paper most times failed if the Democrats won.”

Sometimes there were four or five newspapers existing at the same time, he said.

“That was kind of mind-boggling,” Lindstrom said. “How could a town with, at that point, less than 1,000 people support four newspapers? Of course, a lot of them didn’t exist that long, but certainly The Leader had stayed in power. And I attribute that almost entirely to the family, to the McCurdys.”

Lindstrom goes beyond the beginning of each paper and details how the media evolved from the 1800s until now.

“There’s not only in-depth info about local media, but there’s also quite a lot of local history,” said Scott Wilson, whose time as the publisher of The Leader is recorded in Lindstrom’s book. “This has always been a very ambitious place that attracts ambitious people with wild dreams.”

Lindstrom delves deep into the characters of each era, detailing not only the founders of the paper, but the people who made it what it was along the way.

For The Leader, that means Tom Camfield, a reporter who worked for more than 40 years in the industry and spent many of those years at The Leader, as a print devil, a typesetter, a writer, reporter and photographer. Lindstrom said Camfield’s history books and his personal memories were his “bible” while he researched Port Townsend.

He also details the exceptional tale of Fred Obee, a Leader journalist who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on a crime case.

“I like to say that my goal was that I wanted to bring the characters in Port Townsend to life,” Lindstrom said. “And I think I did. There were so many different characters — Jack London, Jim Whittaker, the first American to scale Mt. Everest was a Port Townsend resident. And the McCurdys brought it to life.”