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.”