Twin Cities Weekly Newspapers Are Shutting Down

Solid local reporting, regular coverage of business openings and ribbon cuttings, a trusted presence for decades in Washington County, MN: None of it was enough to keep the Bulletin going when the pandemic hit.

A weekly newspaper covering Woodbury, Cottage Grove and the county’s southern communities, the 33-year-old Bulletin was done in by an advertising slump inflamed by the coronavirus, its owners said. They shut it down last week, The Star-Tribune reports.

A wave of metro-area newspapers, already dealing with the migration of advertising to websites and news to social media, have closed this spring as newsrooms saw a steep drop-off in revenue brought on by the pandemic. The losses include a weekly that first published when Minnesota was still a territory.

The story is much the same in greater Minnesota and across the country, according to media analyst Owen Van Essen, a Minnesota native who is president of Dirks, Van Essen, Murray and April, a Santa Fe, N.M.,-based newspaper industry merger and acquisition firm.

“There are 200 to 300 small, weekly newspapers that will not be around by the end of the year” nationally, Van Essen said. And as many as 500 newspapers will reduce their publication schedule this year, he said.

The last issue of the Bulletin came out May 6, followed a day later by the last issue of the Hastings Star Gazette. Other papers recently shutting down their presses include the Eden Prairie News, the Lakeshore Weekly News, the Lake County News Chronicle in Two Harbors, the Jasper Journal in southwestern Minnesota and the Osakis Review in central Minnesota, according to the Minnesota Newspaper Association.

The pandemic is partly to blame, but many newspapers had been struggling for years. Ad revenue for all U.S. newspapers was $48.7 billion in 2000, but by 2017 it had fallen to $16.5 billion, according to the Pew Research Center. In that time, Google and Facebook became advertising behemoths.

The Hastings paper and the Bulletin were both owned by RiverTown Multimedia, a subsidiary of Fargo-based Forum Communications. RiverTown Publisher Neal Ronquist told readers in a note published last month that advertising revenue was already declining when the arrival of COVID-19 upended their business model.

“Advertising revenue accounts for approximately 70% of the revenue our paid newspapers generate,” he wrote.

Hastings has at least one local media company left, radio station KDWA 1460 AM / 97.7 FM. Owners Dan and Barb Massman said they have seen more traffic to their website since the Star Gazette closed, but Dan said he’s not happy about the paper’s death. “I think anytime a community loses media, it’s a loss,” he said.

With the largest companies in the newspaper industry riding out a turbulent year, former Minnesota newspaper owner Arlin Albrecht said the business today is “probably as bad as it’s ever been.”

“The local newspapers now are in a situation where I’m not sure whether they’re committing suicide or they’re being murdered,” probably both, he said. Staff cuts will save money but ultimately make the paper less relevant for readers, while ongoing advertising pressures inflict more harm, he said.