Ramstad: Green shoots appearing on Minnesota's local news scene

The news about the news business has been so bleak for so long, I hesitate to amplify something good for fear of jinxing it. Maybe it's the Vikings fan in me.

But I'll just say it. Two weekly newspapers launched in the central Minnesota towns of Hutchinson and Litchfield this summer and the subscriber numbers look really good.

The papers, The Hutchinson Station and The Litchfield Rail, were started by CherryRoad Media, a New Jersey-based company that says it is committed to building up local news operations rather than stripping them down for cash. Since 2020, CherryRoad has purchased or launched a dozen newspapers in Minnesota communities. The papers in Hutchinson and Litchfield take the place of longtime publications that closed in April.

"In Hutchinson, we have over 1,700 paid [print] subscribers. In Litchfield, we have over 1,000, which we're very happy with relative to a lot of small weekly newspapers. Those are great numbers in this day and age," Jeremy Gulban, CEO of CherryRoad, told me last week. "On the advertising side, we've gotten a lot of advertisers back."

With both papers, the company started by distributing them free to every house in their respective counties for a few weeks, then asked people to subscribe. "We've continued to do a shopper, which is a free distribution product that goes to every house," Gulban said, adding that he doesn't think the shopper model is effective. "We've got to move away from that as time goes on," he said.

I heard about CherryRoad from Benjamin Toff, a journalism professor at the University of Minnesota who, along with colleagues, is breathing new life into its Minnesota Journalism Center. Late last month, they produced a report called Minnesota's Local News Ecosystem that found the state has lost 12% of its local news outlets since 2018, or 76 out of 602.

Most of those were small town newspapers, though some were radio and TV stations that gave up news broadcasting. For every two outlets that closed, however, a new one opened. That means there have been 38 newspapers and digital sites created in Minnesota since 2018. One example is the Root River Current, which formed as a nonprofit news organization two years ago to serve residents of Fillmore County in the state's southeast corner.

"As we've been relaunching the journalism center, we've been hearing from more and more people who are, in some cases, non-journalists or people who are just frustrated by there no longer being a source of information in their community. They want to start something," Toff said.

Since the late 1990s, the business of news has changed immensely because of the internet and mobile technologies. Newspapers, radio and TV all adapted to digital distribution, but people turned away from the traditional print and broadcast products to get news from aggregator sites and social media freely available on smartphones and other digital devices.

Newspapers have been hit hardest. In its latest report on news consumption, Pew Research last month said 1 in 5 Americans "sometimes" get their news from print and just 6% "often" do. Those numbers are a bit better for radio and TV, and the complete opposite for digital devices, with nearly 9 in 10 Americans saying they often or sometimes get news that way.

Across the country, newsroom employment fell to about 85,000 people in 2020 from 114,000 in 2008, Pew Research found. And the knock-on effects have been extensive. With local newspapers dying away, the ones that remain are having a harder time getting printed and delivered.

For instance, editors at the Timberjay, the Tower-based newspaper that covers a territory stretching from Cook to Ely in northern Minnesota, spent part of the summer searching for a new printing firm. Since 2014, the Timberjay went from being printed in nearby Virginia to Hibbing, then two different firms in Duluth, then at the Brainerd Dispatch. When the Dispatch's owner decided this summer to move its printing to Detroit Lakes, the Timberjay found a new printer in Cambridge, 180 miles away from Tower.

"It's been a revolving door of owners at the various newspapers and print plants up here," Timberjay publisher Marshall Helmberger said via e-mail.

CherryRoad Media recently bought a printing company in Slayton, in southern Minnesota, to handle its 12 Minnesota newspapers, Gulban said. It moved its northern Minnesota newspapers, which also had been printed by the Dispatch, to the Slayton plant last week.

Local news organizations perform a watchdog function and create a sense of identity in a community. In a note of appreciation to readers this summer, Eli Lutgens, the 25-year-old publisher and editor of the Star-Eagle in New Richland, Minn., mentioned a civic controversy, an interaction with a Walmart greeter and a difficult changeover in the paper's subscription software. "Many of you, really everyone, has been kind when calling, emailing, texting or stopping in person to help me correct the date of your subscriptions," Lutgens wrote.

Some of the distrust that has sprung up nationally about journalism in general, the U's Toff suggested, is because fewer people feel a connection to individual journalists.

"People just believe that they must be making stuff up, because they are hearing a lot of people say they just make things up," Toff said. "And you know, it's a little different when you know [journalists] as your neighbors."