As newsroom numbers dwindle, Minnesota communities battle to preserve local journalism

Aug. 12—PRESTON, Minn. — Ron Scheevel relies on newspapers.

Printed, delivered and tangible, the Fillmore County resident has been reading newspapers almost continuously since he was in his early teens.

In a given week, as many as three show up at his rural home southwest of Preston. He reads the Fillmore County Journal and the Post Bulletin pretty much cover to cover. He reads a national newspaper for a bigger view.

Newspapers, Scheevel said, are important. Important to our society, important to our communities, important as a government watchdog.

For example, government meetings — school boards, city councils, county boards — "It needs to be covered well, so you have a fair and balanced idea of what is going on," he said.

He reads them all to stay informed, even if it's not his town.

"Everything starts at the local level, and I just think it's vital that folks know what's going on," said Scheevel, who said once a story is in print, he feels like that bit of news is something you can trust.

In April, the Minnesota Center for Rural Policy and Development issued a report titled "The Disappearing Rural Newspaper." The 19-page report shows a decades-long decline in the number of newspaper employees in Minnesota, the decline in circulation of newspapers across the United States, and, in Minnesota, the dwindling number of newspapers.

According to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, from 2000 to 2021, the number of newspaper establishments — those that offer print newspapers, not just online editions — fell from 344 to 254, a 26% drop. During that same period, DEED noted, the number of newspaper employees fell from 9,499 to 2,844, a 70% drop, with the average number of employees per newspaper falling from 28 to 11.

None of that, admits Lisa Hills, executive director of the Minnesota Newspaper Association, is good news for the industry.

"If you look at just the pure numbers, it's true there are fewer newspapers," she said. Hills argues the numbers don't tell the whole story. "Many newspapers merged. Many communities had two newspapers, and those communities are still being covered."

John Casper just couldn't do it anymore.

After graduating from college, Casper worked in newspapers for 16 years, rising to become editor of the Winona Daily News. But in 2019, he felt burnt out by the demands of the newspaper industry, particularly the company that owned his newspaper and a few others in the region: Lee Enterprises.

The company owns the Daily News, the La Crosse Tribune and the Chippewa Herald in the immediate area.

Casper said media companies often create efficiencies by bundling tasks with newspapers in a region. Advertising departments can be combined. Editorial functions such as page design and copy editing can be brought under one roof. But with the Lee papers in the region, the move toward efficiency went too far.

"They would just put more and more on your plate," Casper said. By 2018, he became the editor of four newspapers and one quarterly business magazine. "As recently as 2014 or '15, each of those would have had their own editor. I was expected to do the jobs of 16-17 people by the time I was leaving."

As the volume of his workload increased, the attention to detail naturally fell. At the end, Casper said, he was "just getting newspapers out" the door each night in a rush to meet deadlines. Further, he was editor of a newspaper for a town with which he had almost no familiarity. That, he said, is the opposite of local journalism.

Today, Casper is the spokesman for the Winona Area Public Schools. But he still lives in Winona, and he still watches the Daily News to see how it's surviving.

In 2014, the Daily News had seven or eight local reporters. Now, there's two or three, and at least one of those is an editor wearing multiple hats for a city of 26,000 people and a county of almost 50,000 people. But the reduction of the newsroom staff at the Daily News has been gradual over the past 15 to 20 years.

Casper said the purchase of the newspaper by a publicly traded corporation, Lee Enterprises, is only part of the problem. When the Shopko in Winona closed, the newspaper chain lost about $100,000 in annual advertising revenue. Other changes in advertising revenue were also felt.

"When Shopko closed, that was a death blow to Lee papers because Lee papers had Shopkos in their communities," he said.

At least Winona still has a newspaper — two, really, counting the locally owned Winona Post — Casper said.

That's a better fate than what befell the city of St. Cloud.

When the last reporter left the St. Cloud Times — a newspaper that traced its history back to 1861 — on Feb. 1, 2023, the Times, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. It became what some newspaper industry experts call a "ghost paper," meaning the newspaper has online content and might even put out a print edition, but there is little or no local content.

"I do believe ownership matters," said Dale Zather, who has served as chairman of the journalism department at St. Cloud State University since 2014 and will until his term ends in 2023. "Without looking at the paper, you determine how good it is based on who owns it."

Like the Daily News, the Times is owned by a publicly traded company, Gannett. Gannett, which owns USA Today and several large daily newspapers across the country, is the largest newspaper publishing company in the country.

Zather said from his experience in the journalism industry, such companies are often motivated more by quarterly profit reports than local news.

"When that happens, it makes it look like the industry is dying," he said.

Publicly traded ownership groups, like Lee and Gannett, are different from local ownership or even private ownership.

"Private companies don't have to operate at the same profit level," he said. That means more of a focus on journalism than the financial bottom line.

Zather and Casper both said people who go into journalism do so because they love telling stories, they feel a sense of pride in the public service aspect of the job.

Despite the faltering of the newspaper in his university's own backyard, students are still majoring in journalism and mass communications, still interested in being reporters. Still, seeing the Times reduced to a shell of its former self was disheartening for Zather.

"I don't even look at it anymore," he said, adding there's a functioning website, but not much if any, local news.

It's been a long time coming, he said. For example, with the 2022 election approaching, he looked to the Times for local election coverage, information on candidates and local issues. He didn't find what he needed. And blaming typical scapegoats such as social media or the internet doesn't fly with Zather. He points to corporate restructuring.

Now, he said, a metro area of 200,000 people is without a newspaper — a real, local newspaper.

Zather said he's been encouraged by the efforts of Forum Communications Co. to hire reporters in St. Cloud to keep local news alive in the city. Forum Communications, which owns the Post Bulletin, launched

St. Cloud Live

earlier this year. The online publication covers St. Cloud news, weather, sports and business news.

Being just beyond the Twin Cities metro area, the St. Cloud Times played an "outsized role" for the city, Zather said. With most TV news coming from the Twin Cities, the Times was the source of local news in St. Cloud like local newspapers often are, especially in rural Minnesota.

"No stories means no attachment to the community, no analysis of trends," Zather said. "As a newspaper declines, there is more political corruption. There is no replacement for having somebody there at a (public) meeting, someone who knows the people who come in, knows the issues."

Even before COVID, many cities placed videos of their meetings on city websites or YouTube, and meeting minutes are always available within a month after the meeting occurred, Zather said. But even that attempt at transparency doesn't have the same impact as a reporter being at a meeting, sifting through information and following up with sources afterward.

"We're losing the ability to make it make sense," Casper said of the dwindling number of reporters covering the news. "We're losing that storytelling ability. At election time, we're losing the ability to learn what will happen if we elect these people."

Consolidation isn't always a bad thing. For Jason Sethre, owner and publisher of the Fillmore County Journal based in Preston, he saw a group of newspapers all doubling up on the same activities and decided to buy them and streamline the operation.

He bought the Journal in January 2009, and later purchased a group of other, competing newspapers in Fillmore County. Rather than have two reporters, for example, covering a school board meeting in Rushford-Peterson, he bought out the competition and now sends one reporter.

Sethre's staff includes 38 people working for the Journal. There are 13 in the Preston office, one in an office in Caledonia and two sales reps who work from home. And the freelancers, which are the bulk of his reporters, all work from home.

He hires freelancers who live and often work in the communities they cover, which means having people invested in getting the story right. The result, Sethre said, is having quality writers who cover their towns, school boards or topics of interest and do so in a cost-effective way.

"If I hired a bunch of staff, we couldn't cover all the meetings we're covering," Sethre said. "And we've been to every city council meeting in Fillmore County since June 22, 2009."

Like the Winona Post and other weekly newspapers in the region, the Fillmore County Journal is distributed free to residents throughout the county and parts of Houston County. In total, he said, the Journal's weekly circulation is a little over 18,000. And that newspaper that hits those mailboxes is thick: 48-60 pages a week on average.

Sethre's newspaper makes its money on ad sales.

Scheevel, who owns an excavating business, has advertised. He said rather than advertise each week, Sethre's staff understands his advertising needs and looks for special sections where his ads might make the most difference, such as Dairy Month or a football issue. Being in the newspaper shows potential customers that he's giving back to the local community by supporting the local newspaper, which in turn supports local teams, local issues.

Sethre shakes his head at what he sees as the corporate ownership problem that has damaged the Daily News in Winona.

"I walked into the La Crescent Kwik Trip and looked at the news rack," Sethre said. "The Winona Daily News and the La Crosse Tribune, on the front page, had the same photo, the same content. They duplicated the content."

To Sethre, in addition to what he called an embarrassment of putting out two separate newspapers with identical content, it showed how little those newspapers are involved in their local communities.

"When you continuously decrease the value of the product, eventually it comes back, and you have nothing," he said.

He hopes when he's done, the Fillmore County Journal still has value. After all, his children are working on it, with his son in sales and his daughter working on the design side.

Marnie Werner, vice president of research for the Minnesota Center for Rural Policy and Development and the author of "The Disappearing Rural Newspaper" report, said when it comes to newspapers, like so many industries, rural communities feel negative changes the worst.

"One issue in rural areas, businesses are being bought by national and international companies, and their advertising goes away," she said. "There are a couple of schools teaching entrepreneurialism with journalism, teaching them to be owners as well as reporters."

Werner said like with farms, restaurants and other small businesses in small towns, newspapers face a crisis of generational transfer. When the old owner wants to retire, who takes over the business? When no succession plan has been made, often there's no one to hand the business to.

She pointed to a newspaper in New Richland, where a young new owner took over for his father. That newspaper is now expanding to Waseca and adding a Spanish-language version for the region's high Hispanic population.

Werner said she hopes his success can become a model for rural newspapers.

As for the reasons behind the dwindling newspaper industry in Minnesota — in fact, across the nation — Werner said it began in the 1980s with people turning to TV as their main source of news. She also points a finger at the internet, which damaged some revenue streams while not offering a suitable replacement.

"Everyone has had to reinvent and reassess the industry," she said.

However, newspapers are not alone. Movies, book publishing and music also faced new sales, revenue and delivery paradigms with the internet, and each has slowly found its new industry standard. Newspapers are in the midst of doing the same thing, she said.

The good news, Werner said, is that while there are some general problems, newspapers big and small, urban and rural each have their own strengths and weaknesses, which means that smart owners can find solutions to fit their problems.

"When you look at one small newspaper, you've looked at one small newspaper," Werner said. "You can't make too big of a generalization."