Consistently Leaving Us Out Of The Conversation

Over the past month, Minnesota Public Radio has been promoting a pair of programs conducted in July it says will help strengthen the state’s journalism both in the metropolitan areas and our rural communities.
It was a double-header program, with one segment featuring foundations seeking to support community journalism and another featuring journalists working on innovative ways to secure our future.
“Discover successful cooperation models for supporting local news,” the program’s first half said in its promotional piece. “Gain insights into national funders’ perspectives on change and equity in funding, and strategies for building long-term support.’
The leaders of the Joyce Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Knight Foundation, and the Blandin Foundation were on hand as speakers.
Its second half program was titled, “GREATer Minnesota: How Will Local Media Partnerships Shape the Heartland?” Participants were told they would “learn from organizations spearheading local news innovation in Minnesota’s small towns. Explore initiatives to engage rural, urban, and suburban communities and innovate business models.”
It sounded like a great program with encouraging topics for rural Minnesota’s economically challenged community newspapers. When we saw the invitation for the program, we were intrigued and optimistic.
But after reading the speaker lineup, our optimism about hearing of meaningful efforts at the state level to help rural community newspapers turned to disappointment.
We acknowledge that these speakers were talented leaders of some of America’s best national and state foundations who could provide substantial financial support to community journalism. Successful, enterprising journalists from the Twin Cities, a northern Minnesota public radio station, and the publisher of the Star Tribune were among those on the program.
There was one significant problem with this program and so many others like it: For all the hype about local journalism, Greater Minnesota, and solutions for small towns, not one community newspaper owner was on the program. Not a single one.
Event organizers see “local journalism” from a metropolitan perspective. Their programs have nothing to do with sustaining journalism in our small towns. Their “insights” into what will help us are misdirected.
“This time, the focus is entirely on Minnesota,” the program said. “Together, they highlight the need for fresh business models, for a workforce that better reflects the communities it serves, and for a collaborative, instead of a competitive, approach among Minnesota newsrooms,” it said.
How could its organizers make such grandiose claims and never involve one of rural Minnesota’s community newspapers? This metro-centric thinking toward rural journalists and journalism is increasingly offensive.
But the real tragedy is that they discuss what is good for us without understanding the dynamics at work in our small towns. Their upbeat language dismisses the reality we face, gives the public a false sense of security and promise for the future of community newspapers, and frustrates efforts to engage legislators and members of Congress on bills that will support us into the future.
Membership models, non-profit status, grants from philanthropies, temporary subsidies for journalists, diverting staff time already stressed in covering the news into other areas to generate revenue on the side – none of these will stop the decimation of rural community newspapers.
Digital solutions have proven a dead-end for saving newspapers. We’ve done the math at our three community newspapers. The digital advertising and subscriptions, while important, don’t support even one person. For most small-town newspapers, digital payments represent no more than 5% of their income.
More than 76% of American cities, more than 14,600, have a population under 5,000. Many of us who are among the 76% of truly small towns in America don’t live in a community with a foundation to support local causes. Our regional foundations would be stretched to provide grants to small-town newspapers on an ongoing basis.
Report for America sponsored July’s program. Report for America is a national service program and an initiative of the nonprofit media organization, The GroundTruth Project.  It is filling the reporting void in communities around the country through a grant program that places journalists in newsrooms.
Its “mission is to strengthen our communities and our democracy through local journalism that is truthful, fearless, fair, and smart.” Its journalists work in newspapers, public radio stations, TV stations, and digital platforms.
It is training a new generation of journalists, filling the gaps left by corporate closures of newspapers, and the gutting of newsrooms by investment companies interested in profits not reporting. It helps newspapers struggling to survive and provide their communities with badly needed news reporting.
Report for America covers half the salary for a journalist in the first year of a three-year contract. It provides one-third of the salary in the second year and 20% in the third year. The newspaper with the support of a local foundation or donor, pays the balance each year.
After three years, the newspaper could hire the journalist it trained.  But where do the funds come from to pay the journalist’s full salary? They didn’t exist before the Report for America grant help and won’t afterward unless long-term, sustainable state and federal help arrives to support community newspapers.
When MPR broadcasts its promotion of the discussions of this event statewide, it misleads most rural Minnesotans on what took place and how their community newspapers could benefit from what was discussed.
We’ve been a long-time subscriber to Minnesota Public Radio. We value its reporting. It and our public television stations are playing an increasingly important role in news coverage in the state as the Associated Press and newspaper coverage has faded. They add to what we do at the local level. We hope in the future when they talk about “local journalism” they include those of us working in small rural communities.