Journalism's a family affair

If you had to move 13 times in 15 years, you might decide, too, "enough already. If I'm going to stay in journalism, I'm buying my own paper."
Meet Tim Franklin, and his family –wife, Mary, and two daughters, Emilee, 14, and Savannah, 10.
They eat, sleep and breathe community journalism.

Tim's journalism career began as editor-in-chief of the University of Minnesota-Duluth Statesman in 1990. That was the start of his I-35 and I-90 tour (as he calls it) that included being downsized in a later journalism job in Duluth, followed by moves to Louisiana, Kansas, South Dakota because of promotions and finally back to Minnesota.

It was then that he faced up to the facts of life: if he was to stay with a big company, more than likely there’d be another downsize. “I came home one day and told Mary, ‘I think we should buy a newspaper.’ She thought I’d lost my mind,” he said
Now, after making the leap to owner six years ago, and with two papers – the Hinckley News and the Pine County Courier, journalism is a family affair.
The day Joni and I visited was one of the two days a week that Mary can be found at the computer near the front counter that looks out onto Sandstone’s Main Street. One daughter was seated at a desk playing computer games and the other was in the back taking a nap.
Mary said that the kids know the meaning of self-employment and that owning your own business instills a strong work ethic. “They (the kids) know how and when to take out the garbage,” maybe something that a young reporter at a big paper might balk at because “it isn’t part of my job description,” she said. “Here, everybody takes out the garbage.”
Sure Tim works hard – excuse me - they work hard. But he feels like he’s got some control over his family’s future – he’s the one who can tweak the budget to bring it in balance when need be. And as for the Internet, well he’s a self-described maverick – not in the way you might think! For now, at least, he’s bucking the current trend of moving publications online.
“Why let them have it for free,” Mary said.
Tim knows that each week’s “must reads” are the obituaries and the police and sheriff’s report.” But he said his readers are not necessarily Internet consumers. “I think people in small communities still want something they can hold.
With a paid circulation of about 2,000, Tim is optimistic about the future of his communities and the publications. Located along I-35W between the Twin Cities and Duluth, he says the area will continue to grow.

As far as advice to young journalists - start at a small newspaper and get experience - and after a few years, think about owning your own paper. Along the way he suggests students should find time for classes in human resources, finances and “learn how to read a balance sheet.”
He said that small communities are great places to live … to raise kids. “And there are the friendships you develop, the Thursday night golf league and being close to your readers. If there’s controversy , you hear about it.”

He doesn't regret the path he has chosen and summed it up this way: "Downsizing was the best thing that could have happened to me."

We’re on our way.

We began the day with a visit to the Lakeshore Weekly News. Brett Strusa, the editor, has been a consistent supporter of the U of M community journalism class by taking on interns each of the past three semesters.
The paper’s office is inside a nondescript building in a Minnetonka business park. There’s no sign on the outside to let you know that “your community paper is here.” Brett had to give me directions to the office, saying that many people find it hard to find….ummmmmm. She’s right, you walk down a long hall and finally come to suite 1017 … and still you aren’t sure that it is a newspaper office as the plaque on the door reads: “Arts and Custom Lakeshore Communications Lakeshore.”
What a contrast to the community newspapers we visited later in the day in Sandstone and Isle where the newspaper offices were centrally located on Main Street. It makes you really think: How can a paper be part of the community - or reflect the community - if it is housed like any other business, and not part of the Main Street and accessible to the people it serves? Just a bit more challenging, I suspect.
Anyway, Brett is a committed journalist … committed to telling the stories of the communities she serves. She likes community journalism and the relationships she can build with the readers.
She went to NYU and majored in journalism, and never imagined that her first job (for one year) would put her in the small western Minnesota community of Olivia. I didn’t ask her, but I think that possibly this is where she received her rootedness, her sense of community.
The Lakeshore Weekly News, which is locally owned by one individual, is struggling to maintain its readership, Strusa said. It is a free distribution paper, with about 18,000 copies available across 700 drop-off sites.
She fears some hard economic decisions will need to be made because the decline in the housing market, which translates to fewer real estate ads and lower revenues for the paper, is compounded with higher paper and ink costs.
Brett is cautiously hopeful that five years from now she will still be in journalism, but warns those in j school to be “wise to the reality of the job. … you are going to be tested.”

Rekindling my love affair with community journalism

Four years is a long time to be away from something you love.
My 25 years as editor and reporter at community papers, especially my stint in the small western Minnesota burg of Montevideo where I raised my kids and owned a business, left me with memories of feeling connected to the people I wrote about and a tremendous pride in recording a community's history.
Heading out last week on our road trip to visit seven community newspapers in three days - traveling over 900 miles - I wondered if I might find that my love affair with community journalism was just an illusion - that the years away from the trade had washed aside all negatives of 24-7 living, breathing the news and stories of the people who shared a geographical space with me.
As representatives of the University of Minnesota School of Journalism, my co-teacher Joni Berg and I had our list of questions for the editors we were to visit, our digital gadgets to record our trip for a promised presentation on the state of community journalism, especially in rural Minnesota.
But for me, well, this trip was about something else - I hoped to find some shining star out there that I could hang on to regarding the future of journalism.
Living in the metro area, it's been hard watching the slow death of daily papers with their shrinking news holes, staff cuts and lost circulation. As paper and ink prices rise, the disease is hitting the suburban weeklies as well.
This has left me with questions about the future of the news business and the craft of newsgathering. Are "those" people right? Is the newspaper dead?
Maybe the situation is different at the smaller outlying community papers, especially the ones with local owners, I mused.
Lately I've been asking myself the question that students and their parents gotta be asking too - Why would any 18- to 21-year-old go to school for four years to be a journalist, amass debt only to look forward to a job that pays little and promises no stability?
With a new class year starting soon, new students eager to take up the quill, I need to match their enthusiasm.
This trip I hoped, would give it to me.