North Minneapolis neighborhood newspaper quietly shuts down after 50 years
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The Camden Community News has been the voice of its north Minneapolis neighborhood since 1976.
The neighborhood east of Victory Memorial Parkway and north of Lowry Avenue found out what was happening by opening the free monthly publication. On Sunday, however, it went the way of many local newspapers.
“This last issue, tough, very tough,” said editor Laurel Parrott.
After 50 years, the Community News became the latest in a continuing trend of local news closures. In 2025 alone, 136 newspapers closed around the U.S. — about two per week, according to researchers at Northwestern University. Most were small, independent outlets.
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Parrott didn’t sleep much while preparing the paper to be mailed to 10,000 households and hand-delivered to businesses in the neighborhood.
She’s gotten hundreds of issues to the printers before and faced other tough deadlines. After a devastating tornado barreled through in 2011, Parrott lost power for two weeks.
“My husband got a generator, and we were able to put things together,” she said.
The Camden Community News has been free since launching in the ‘70s, during a heyday for hyperlocal publications. Minneapolis and St. Paul once had more of these papers than anywhere else in the country, according to longtime community journalist Jane McClure.
Camden’s newspaper was forward-thinking. By the mid-’90s, it joined the digital world with a website — around the same time as larger media outlets like the Minnesota Star Tribune and MPR. That website went offline a few months ago.
When Parrott joined the paper in the 1990s, she was paid to edit. For the last decade or so, she’s volunteered about 50 to 60 hours each month. It was her way of making up for declining advertising revenue and rising costs for printing and postage.
In its 2025 tax filing, Camden Community News spent about $10,000 more than it brought in from ads and donations. The numbers were similar the year prior.
All the members of Camden Community News’ board are retired and unpaid. Chair Buzzy Bohn said running a monthly paper with basically all volunteer labor while losing money became too much.
“We’ve been talking over the last few years, ‘How long are we going to be able to keep this going?’” she said. “We were sort of hell-bent on making it to 50 years because we could have easily closed before that.”
They reached that milestone in June and decided to print a couple more issues. Bohn said the board wanted to end while they felt they were doing a good job, rather than watching their paper wither and die.
The editor and board members of the Camden Community News said the Sept. 2026 issue would be the paper's last. Screenshot courtesy of Camden Community News
Bohn started writing for the Camden Community News in the 1990s, covering schools — often closures, of which there were many. More recently, she’s written about community history.
“We were pretty much always focused on the positive parts of this part of north Minneapolis,” she said. “I think that you know sometimes north Minneapolis gets a bad rap, in particular, from people who don't live here.”
David Pierini edits North News, a different hyperlocal, non-profit publication in the same part of the city. He’s found Camden Community News to be a useful source of information.
“They covered little businesses that opened up that we didn't know about, or they had some sort of update on a development project that we could either follow up on ourselves or just let people know, ‘Hey, Camden Community News covered this,’” he said.
He was flipping through the August issue when he learned the paper was closing. Buried on page 3, a letter from Parrot and the board said, “If we can swing it, the last issue will be September. But that’s it.”
“To me that’s the big news. 50 years of operation, and you’ve got to close, and you put it on page 3?” he said. “But obviously, they felt that it was more important to let people know about the local elections that were happening and a street festival that was going on. And I thought that was admirable.”
While the trend in local news has been dour for years, there are some signs of improving. Northwestern found more than 300 local news startups launched last year, mostly online and mostly in urban areas.
Minnesota has examples like this: small outlets pushing against the trend.
Several online, hyperlocal newsrooms in the Twin Cities joined forces in a group called the Metro Nonprofit News Network, aiming for a model that serves communities where corporate-owned newspapers have shut down. The alternative digital outlet Racket MN, formed by City Pages employees after the Star Tribune shut down that publication, celebrated its fifth birthday this weekend.
But Pierini can’t escape some of the dread that came with the Community News’ end.
“I work every day with the anxiety of decline in revenue, upticks in our printing costs, transportation costs, and like them, we’re doing it on a shoestring,” he said. “I’m always thinking, how are we going to survive?”
Another challenge they face is changing trends in news consumption. Many people don’t read newspapers, especially physical copies. Small news websites’ online presence can be drowned out by larger outlets.
Mishelle Phelps, for example, has seen the Camden Community News all over her neighborhood. It’s tucked in the entrance to the Lowry Cafe, where she has breakfast sometimes.
Her grandmother used to read it, but she said she has never read it herself, opting instead to find out what is happening in her neighborhood from social media or talking with family members.
Phelps and her cousin Skye Brooks agreed that even if they don’t read the paper, it’s still important.
“What about the older people that read the newspaper? What about the resources for them?” Brooks said.
Pierini said some in the community will only recognize the loss of the paper once it’s gone.
“Camden Community News did something no other media outlet in the Twin Cities did, and they did it better than anybody, which is cover Camden,” he said.
He said his outlet, North News, will try to fill the gap.
Parrott has heard from people who want the paper to live on. Some in the community have urged her and the board to find someone else to take on the challenge. She said they may be able to put the website back up with the archives.
But if that doesn’t happen, she said she is at peace with the ending.
“I just want to say thanks to everybody who's contributed over the past 50 years.”
