Yes, local newspapers do make a difference

Last week I took a road trip with a friend of mine to Chanhassen, and no, we didn’t catch a show at the dinner theater.
We went to a volunteer launch, for a newly formed online news platform called Carver County Local News.
Our interest in it was, we used to cover Carver County along with Scott County, while working for now defunk Southwest News Media, a collection of six newspapers south of the Twin Cities. Myself and close to a dozen reporters and editors, along with all other staff members, lost our jobs, following the decision by Alden Global, the owner of the company, to close the papers.
While at the event, we heard multiple people speak about the importance of local news, and many in attendance who spoke about the papers they once had, each week, and how much they missed it.
I applaud the efforts of the volunteer board to try to revive a news source to the area, an area, despite being one of the richest, and biggest counties in the State, has found itself in the unfortunate reality of not having local news for months.
But this doesn’t have to be the case.
It’s no secret newspapers are struggling in Minnesota, and elsewhere. Here in Dodge County, in my opinion, the community is fortunate to have an independently owned paper. In my career I have worked for five different newspapers, or newspaper groups, the vast majority owned independently, meaning not a corporate paper.
Out of those 100% of the locally owned papers are still operating, while the ones owned by corporations have either sold multiple times, or have closed altogether.
When I got laid off, I called the owner of this newspaper, someone who I worked for years ago, as a 22-year-old, and asked him if he had a job for me.
He didn’t, but unlike some other papers, the importance of quality news trumps any kind of profits here, so he found me a spot on the team.
At the same time, not all locally owned papers are able to survive in the ever changing times.
In 2019, I had a pit in my stomach when I sat down with Melanie and Larry Dobson, the former owners of the Byron Review and Dodge Center Star Herald. The Dobsons love their community, and wanted nothing more than to continue telling stories in the community they call home.
Unfortunately they weren’t able to hang on, and I wrote the story of two closed newspapers, while as a news organization, we met for hours, discussing how we would fill the news void. Like the owner of this paper did when I got laid off, he brought in Karen Jorgensen, a veteran reporter, who worked for the Dobsons, and now serves as the editor of this paper.
We also expanded our sports coverage. Instead of focusing primarily on Kasson-Mantorville, and Dodge Center, our coverage for sports turned to a county-wide model covering Hayfield and Byron just as much.
This week, we have two full pages of Byron girls soccer coverage, after they won the Section tournament. For years to come, they will have a keepsake, a physical copy of the paper or article, but when the Byron Review stopped printing, the fear was that those days would be over.
Luckily, we were able to pick up the void, but if you look around, we are the only weekly paper left in Dodge County and western Olmsted County.
When Southwest News Media closed its doors, I was tasked with writing the story. It’s a story I never want to have to write again.
With all that said, the reality is we need your help, to get more subscribers. If you are reading this paper, it likely means you know the importance of local news because you subscribed to the paper, or went out and bought a copy.
But a lot of people may not know the importance of it. My hope is you will consider talking to your friends and neighbors, family members, or colleagues about it, encouraging them to perhaps subscribe, or at least give it a read.
There is one recent story that resonates with me about the importance of local news.
I wrote a story for Southwest News Media, about the city looking to open its own dispensary, something cities across the State were at least having conversations about including in Kasson.
The city council in Kasson, was presented with an article before making its decision, turns out it was mine, and turns out, my reporting, at the very least, helped inform the council’s decision.
So think, if an article written an hour away, in a Twin Cities suburb can have an impact on a Greater Minnesota community, imagine the impact the local paper has.
It does.