Illustration by Gary Neill
an illustration of a news man's hat with press credentials on top of a newspaper
If you picked up a copy of the Swift County Monitor-News in Benson, Minnesota, last July, you could have found out that the Benson City Council’s election year would change, that a biogas energy company was proposing to construct a facility to turn cow manure and turkey litter into renewable energy, that COVID vaccination rates in the county lagged behind the Twin Cities, and that the Benson Plowboys, the town ball team, ended the regular season with an 8–6 victory at Cottonwood.
In other words, news you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.
“Without [the paper], there is no news in a small town,” says Reed Anfinson, who writes most of the stories for the Swift County Monitor-News—one of three community papers he owns and publishes. “We’re absolutely essential to an informed electorate. I was covering a hospital board meeting tonight, and I was the only citizen who wasn’t on staff or an elected official. It’s the same with county board and school district meetings. They have citizen comment time, but 95 percent of the time there’s nobody there.”
Recently, when Anfinson was on a call with the city manager and an engineering firm in the Twin Cities about a wastewater treatment facility upgrade project, the manager introduced his staff and added, “And the newspaper, representing the people of Benson.”
Minnesota has a strong tradition of community newspapers, says Lisa Hills, executive director of the Minnesota Newspaper Association. Unlike many areas of the U.S. that are now considered news deserts, most of Minnesota’s rural residents can still pick up a copy of a local paper like the Mesabi Tribune or Sleepy Eye Herald-Dispatch. The 270 members of the MNA include the Star Tribune, with a Sunday circulation of 370,768, according to the MNA, but most have circulations under 2,500, like the Hanska Herald, circulation 250, which covers Hanska in Brown County. Although nationally at least 25 percent of papers have closed, the pandemic may not have had the devastating effect that many feared, at least in Minnesota.
Why They’re Doing OK
Not surprisingly, the pandemic wreaked havoc on the bottom lines of many news outlets as advertising budgets shrank. Still, some of Minnesota’s newspapers actually increased readership.
“I look at our web traffic, and it’s up 62 percent year to date this year to last,” says Justin R. Lessman, president of the MNA and publisher of the Lakefield Standard. “Digital subscriptions [at the Pilot] are up 30 percent, and print is up 10 percent. As I talk with publications across the state, I’m hearing similar numbers.”
Hills has been surprised to hear like reports, and she speculates that for some, the pandemic sparked a return to traditional journalism values.
“Newspapers are providing accurate information,” she says. “People have really turned to them over the last year.”
With divisive and inaccurate information often swamping social media, Lessman theorizes that people—including advertisers—are turning back to traditional news sources because they offer a higher level of trust and accuracy.
Or it could be the box score of the town’s amateur baseball team. People who live in areas that have lost papers—like the Warroad Pioneer, which closed in 2019 after 121 years—report missing basic local information, Hills says.
“They don’t get the obits, they aren’t hearing about how groups can gather, they’re not getting information about public meetings,” she says.
And there are still a lot of homes that don’t have broadband access, Hills points out, so a printed newspaper is often the only way some can get news.
“If something happens in downtown New York, you can find out about it anywhere,” says Lessman, who has spent his entire career in community newspapers. “But the only place you’ll find out who won the grand championship steer at the Jackson County Fair is the Jackson County Pilot.”
Indeed, print newspapers shouldn’t be considered dinosaurs, Anfinson argued in an opinion piece for the Star Tribune. They should be considered windmills: a reinvention of a tried-and-true technology that solves a new problem.
More Challenges
The polarization of the country doesn’t always work in newspapers’ favor, as Anfinson was recently reminded by a handwritten letter to the editor informing him that the Stevens County Times of Morris was “always pushing the liberal slant” and that if it weren’t for the want ads and a few articles, she would cancel her subscription.
“Deep political polarization has people seething when views other than those they agree with are published,” Anfinson says. “It loses us subscribers. Even commonsense columns urging people to get vaccinated anger some. Talking about expanding voting rights rather than shrinking them will lose us subscribers.”
Anfinson and Lessman both love their jobs, but covering the news in a small town isn’t exactly easy.
“The staff at community newspapers are members of the community and want to see it thrive,” Lessman explains. “But there’s a line between being an objective journalist and engaging in boosterism. A good community journalist walks that line fairly objectively, but with the community in mind. The newspaper serves a function to hold the community together, to reflect its values, and to be an integral part of it.”
And there are challenges that urban journalists can easily avoid—namely, situations where you have to write unflattering stories about your friends. “If you wrote a story about the county commissioner in Hennepin County, you’d never see him again,” Lessman says. “Here, you’ll probably go to church with him or see him in the grocery store. So the pressure is on to treat people objectively and fairly.”
Sometimes being the only observer at public meetings comes with added responsibilities, too. “At each of the public meetings I cover—city council, school, and hospital—95 percent of the time, I am the only citizen in the room who is not an elected official or staff,” Anfinson says. “It puts me in the position of pointing out what the Open Meeting Law requires, or that documents are public data, or that they can’t sit huddled around after they adjourn, discussing a topic on the agenda. Often, those serving on the public body are friends.”
At a recent city council meeting, Anfinson asked one of the council members why he had voted against a motion.
“He replied, ‘I don’t have to tell you,’” Anfinson says. “I told him that as an elected official, he owed it to those who put him in office to be upfront with the reasons for his votes, not hide them. He just turned and walked away.”
The Future
Lessman maintains a rosy view.
“Newspapers are strong and in a unique position to be poised for some real growth as long as we keep doing what we’re doing well,” he says. “They’re an important part of the community and public circle. That’s what I keep preaching.”
Still, getting to that rosy future may take a greater recognition of the importance of community journalism, Hills and Anfinson say. “It’s important to remember that newspapers are the first draft of history for a community,” Hills says. “Many times, it’s the only draft.” She points to research that shows a connection between the local news habits and civic engagement. “People tend not to vote or be involved without local news,” she says.
“News is a public good,” Anfinson says. “Historically, newspapers received aid from the federal government in the form of things like lower postal rates and so on. Early on, people realized that newspapers need public support.” Because without them? “It’s dangerous for democracy.”
So it was good news indeed when, just three weeks after the International Falls Journal closed its doors, the Rainy Lake Gazette launched—complete with news of the North American Sturgeon Championship, a successful season for the Ice Cats softball team, a new tractor supply store opening, and over 200 pounds of fish fried for a school fundraiser.
