Minnesota's rural newspapers are disappearing. What happened?

CATHY WURZER: Hey, here's a question for you. Do you read a newspaper every day? Occasionally? Some of us still like to feel the paper of an actual newspaper. Others get the paper's content online. Still others could not care less about newspapers. And that is a problem, especially in rural areas. According to a report last week from the Minnesota Center for Rural Policy and Development, a quarter of Minnesota's local newspapers have shut down over the past 20 years.

Our next guest is familiar with the industry's challenges. Reed Anfinson is publisher and owner of three newspapers in western Minnesota-- the Swift County Monitor-News in Benson, the Grant County Herald in Elbow Lake, and the Stevens County Times in Morris. He's also on the board of the Center for Rural Policy and Development, and Reed's with us. It is good to hear your voice. How are you, Reed?

REED ANFINSON: Great. It's good to hear your program. I've always enjoyed it.

CATHY WURZER: I appreciate that. Thank you so very much. Well, I am one of those people who actually like to read a newspaper and in the flesh in terms of liking to feel the paper between my hands, so I guess I'm kind of a dinosaur here. But I read newspapers, especially small town newspapers. But gosh, the numbers in this report read are not good. 120 Minnesota papers have closed in the past 20 years. The people who are working on the papers-- numbers have dropped. What were your initial thoughts when you saw that report?

REED ANFINSON: It's something I'm familiar with, to start with. I served as president of the National Newspaper Association and spoke about this topic around the country where we're seeing it everywhere, where we're losing rural newspapers and community newspapers. And so it wasn't a shock, but it's dismaying. What's happening that we're losing the news. And in rural America, often the community newspaper is the only source of news.

When I attend the school board meeting tonight, I will probably likely be the only citizen in the room other than staff and elected officials. And so nobody will know anything about the school board's actions tonight if I don't attend that meeting.

CATHY WURZER: What are you hearing from other communities? I mean, you, as I say, have three newspapers under your purview, but you're mentioning that things are just kind of falling through the cracks. What might be an example of something that would be happening in a community that no one would know about?

REED ANFINSON: Well, let's say that you're going to bond for $25 million to build some new buildings in the school district, and you need them. But if there's nobody reporting on that bonding effort, one of two things happens. It doesn't get passed when you really need it badly to fix your schools, and there's a lot of misinformation.

People end up going to Facebook or some other sources trying to get the facts behind the reasoning for the need for that bond to build those new buildings for your school or to fix the buildings that you have. And so your kids sit in rooms that are too cold or too hot and don't get as quality of education as they should.

CATHY WURZER: And of course, there's also instances of local officials passing tax levies or suggesting raising taxes without anyone really understanding why because, as you say, a reporter wasn't at that meeting or meetings to actually lay out the arguments for and against that. And I'm wondering here, too. How did we get to this point? I mean, obviously everyone points to the internet disrupting so many industries, but were there storm clouds even before the internet really took hold?

REED ANFINSON: Yes. The hedge funds bought into newspapers-- not just community newspapers, but the big newspapers around the country. They saw a need to make more profits for their investors. For example, there was a daily newspaper in Florida that had just won five Pulitzers, I believe.

And when called by the CFO, they said, well, that's great that you won the Pulitzers, but you got to cut some staff because we need to have a better return on investment. And that was coming even before the internet. And in rural Minnesota, we're not just facing the internet. We're facing the loss of rural population.

Swift County's population is lower than it was in 1900 right now. We're facing the consolidation of stores into regional and national chains. And so that local owner that was very loyal to us as a newspaper doesn't spend a dime with us anymore. And we're seeing Amazon eat away at our Main Street as people order products they could walk two blocks and buy, but they get it coming to their door by Amazon.

CATHY WURZER: So how are you surviving financially?

REED ANFINSON: We are leaner. We don't spend as much on printing our newspapers or staff, which we badly need. We are going to need help at some point here. I received a call this past year from a publisher who was in his 80s and said he just couldn't produce his newspaper anymore. He had just run out of gas.

And would I buy it from him, or did he know somebody who would? Because he hated to close the doors, and he was faced with that decision of having to walk away. And that's happening across the country, not just in Minnesota. And it'll happen with my three newspapers. Who is going to be interested in buying those three newspapers if there isn't a revenue stream that guarantees their ability to pay for them?

CATHY WURZER: Unless you go nonprofit, Reed. I mean, I'm wondering about that. Obviously, there is a nonprofit media model out there. Is that something that you could look at?

REED ANFINSON: Well, a nonprofit media model relies on two things-- foundations giving you money and citizens giving you money. If you live in a county of less than 10,000 people and have one foundation that has a meager amount of money compared to the need-- had $100,000 in assets against $40,000 in money available. And we're rare that we have a nice foundation, but we don't have the foundation or the citizen base to allow a nonprofit model to work for us.

CATHY WURZER: I'm wondering this, too, and I don't know what you thought about this. St. Cloud Times obviously fell on some hard times with its owner and [INAUDIBLE] decimated the newsroom and shut it down. Since that time, a few online-only publications have kind of swooped in to cover St. Cloud and Central Minnesota. Obviously, The Times, bigger than most local newspapers, but curious about that model working elsewhere.

REED ANFINSON: Online doesn't work the best. I mean, for example, for the community newspapers-- of the 2,500 lost in America in these last 20 years, the vast majority have been community newspapers. And online, we generate 1% to 3% of our income maybe if we're lucky-- maybe 5%. There just isn't any revenue there for us. We're too small.

We don't have the hundreds of thousands or millions of hits that you need. And in a digital world only, news disappears. The revenue is not there to hire the journalists for it, and we just become part of the fire hose that's online. People don't get their news online. They're on Facebook, social media. They're texting. They're reading about disaster news or tragedies somewhere, but they're not really reading the civic news.

They need to participate in a representative democracy, and that's where we're headed. And when artificial intelligence is able to generate millions of additional pieces of misinformation daily, we're going to be swamped by misinformation on the internet. That print newspaper is going to be the only thing that people have other than public radio that they can really trust for a news source.

CATHY WURZER: Reed, my gosh. You've painted a really dismal picture here. Is there any light at the end of the tunnel at all?

REED ANFINSON: Well, if we can get help, if community newspapers can get state help or federal help through legislation-- states have kind of taken the lead on this because the federal government, despite all the efforts of Amy Klobuchar to help us out, just aren't going anywhere. Those federal efforts keep getting stopped, so states are stepping up. At the Minnesota Newspaper Association Convention this past January, we had Governor Walz there, and he opened the floor to questions.

And I asked him, would you support community newspapers with legislation if it came to you? And he said, bring me something. We need to do that. We need to bring Governor Walz and the state legislature some form of legislation that's being developed in both California and Washington State that would help community newspapers survive, hire journalists, and pass the newspaper on to the next generation. That's what we need to do.

CATHY WURZER: I wish I had more time with you. Reed, I appreciate you outlining some of the issues. Before you go, you mentioned you're not sure who's going to take over your papers. Might there be a young consortium of reporters who could do something like that? And if so, what's your pitch for why local news is worth investing in?

REED ANFINSON: Well, local news is definitely worth investing in because it is incredibly rewarding to write those stories and have the people of your community thank you for writing the stories, talking about the story in front of you in a group of people and how important it was, really acknowledging the fact that you're the guy that wrote the story. You're the gal that wrote the story.

And they're talking about it. And that's rewarding. Writers need that psychic reward, but we'll never attract that next generation of journalists in rural Minnesota if they don't see a revenue stream to pay for the purchase of that newspaper. We have to have a secure financial future for the next generation to step in.

CATHY WURZER: Something to work on. Reed, in addition to well everything that you're doing as a journalist, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

REED ANFINSON: Thank you very much for this opportunity.

CATHY WURZER: Reed Anfinson is publisher and owner of the Swift County Monitor-News in Benson, the Grant County Herald in Elbow Lake, and the Stevens County Times in Morris. By the way, you can find this full report at ruralmn.org.