.jpg)
CONSUMER CONFIDENCE REPORT CONSUMER CONFIDENCE REPORT
CONSUMER CONFIDENCE REPORT
In Mahnomen County, 18% of the population lives in poverty, compared with the state rate of 9.6%, according to census data.
Kraft, who hadn’t heard about the study, continues to work tirelessly to get the paper out every week.
Doing so has taught her how much her community relies on the Pioneer. It’s why her shoes are falling apart at the soles, why she spends every Wednesday getting in and out of her Ford Taurus delivering papers, and why she stays up until late hours of the night getting the paper ready for print.
“Every time a paper goes down, it’s sad because it’s all that dedication and effort,” she said with tears in her eyes. “This is what small town papers are doing and what they mean to their communities. Every time this small town paper goes down, that’s what’s been lost — all that dedication, all that effort, all that history, all that.”
A third of Minnesota’s papers lost In 2023, the country lost 2.5 newspapers per week, up from 2 or 1.5 in previous years, the Northwestern University study found.
Between 2005 and 2023, North and South Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota lost the most newspapers per capita, with most of them being weeklies. Of these states, Minnesota has lost the third most per capita (2.2 papers for every 100,000 people).
According to a report from the Center for Rural Policy and Development, a think tank based in Mankato, among the approximately 120 Minnesota newspapers that disappeared between 2000 and 2022, around 40% of them were weeklies serving the Twin Cities suburbs while the other 60% were Greater Minnesota papers.
Since 2004, Minnesota has lost 135 papers, 131 of them weeklies. In terms of count, Minnesota has lost the sixth most newspapers since 2004; that’s 37% of its papers, ranking 19th in the country, according to Metzger.
In the past five years alone, as newspapers have merged across Minnesota, the state has lost about 50 papers, said Lisa Hills, the executive director of the Minnesota Newspaper Association. “We’ve seen a lot of consolidation, which has resulted in fewer newspapers. But we were not seeing a lot of outright closures up until a few weeks ago,” she said in reference to the MediaNews Group closings.
Hills noted that in many small towns, sometimes the sole person at city council or school board meetings is a local reporter, representing the public.
She added: “Newspapers can really tell the history and story of the community, and they share the good news and the bad news and the celebrations. They’re the one piece that ties everyone in the community together.”
Some promising developments
Nationally, digital news organizations — many of them nonprofit outlets like MinnPost — have attempted to fill some of the gap, though primarily in urban regions, with 90%-95% of digital startups being in metropolitan areas, Metzger said.
That’s a gap that Nora Hertel, a journalist who worked at several papers owned by Gannett, has recognized. Hertel moved to St. Cloud to work for the Gannett- owned St. Cloud Times in 2017 after working at a Gannett paper in Wisconsin. She survived several rounds of layoffs and saw the instability they brought to the newsroom and the reporters’ ability to produce impactful work.
In 2021, there was another wave of layoffs at the Times. As they lost people, “it just got hard to cover those things,” she said. “I was an investigative reporter there. And it was hard for me to do big investigations. I could only focus on probably one at a time, and it would take me months to complete it because we had a daily paper to do every day.”
When she left the company in 2021, she said, around 12 people still worked at the St. Cloud Times — compared with the nearly 15 when she started. The following year, things unraveled with two reporters getting laid off, one reporter leaving and buyouts for senior staff. By the end of that year, three people were working there.
She left with the hopes of creating a news organization that would focus on Greater Minnesota. She applied for a fellowship and received funding that helped her to get Project Optimist off the ground.
“I made the decision to focus on greater Minnesota because, you know, to be honest with you, because MinnPost exists, Sahan Journal exists and the Star Tribune exists, and public radio is based in the Twin Cities,” she said, “there’s a lot concentrated in those areas. And I think that Greater Minnesota needs more media.”
Project Optimist’s staff of four people covers issues that affect Greater Minnesota with a focus on solutions journalism — bringing hope and positivity to news, something that she learned people wanted more of.
In Cloquet, meanwhile, the weekly Pine Knot News works to keep the news in the city at its core.
The paper was started in 2018 after some staffers left the Pine Journal, a weekly owned by Forum Communications, over fears that the company was reducing its focus on Cloquet, according to Jana Peterson, the editor of the Pine Knot News.
“We are your hometown newspaper, and we’re not part of the big corporation that might pull out next week,” she said. “Local news gets people verified knowledge of whatever’s happening, a watchdog function, of course, an investigative function.”
The Pine Knot News isn’t rolling in dough, either, but Peterson said that’s not what they’re there for. “We’re just making enough money to pay our staff and pay our rent,” she said. “But, I mean, you just can’t be in it to make bank anymore. You have to be in it for the right reason.” Most of its 1,900 subscribers are Cloquet residents, although, like the Mahnomen Pioneer, the Pine Knot news gets delivered to people in other states. At first, the paper struggled financially because it didn’t run the routine legal ads that can make up as much as 20% of a small paper’s income.
“I do think that we are proof that a traditional newspaper can still succeed,” Peterson said. “We sell ads and subscriptions to survive and pay the bills.”
Some ideas for help have been floated at the federal level. One proposed bill, for instance, would provide a tax credit to businesses that advertise in their local paper and a payroll tax credit to papers that hire and keep local journalists.
A full day in Mahnomen When Kraft first started at the Pioneer, there were certainly more bodies around. These days, it’s just her and Michael Flake, who does the design and layout work.
Every Wednesday morning, Kraft drives about 40
