Does our future still include a newspaper?
Steve Hallstrom
Special to The Farmer
I’d like to tell you that the headline hit me like a ton of bricks. Truth is, I’ve seen it so often, now, that it just makes me sigh.
“Crookston Daily Times puts out its final edition”
Add another tombstone to the graveyard of great community newspapers.
We know the world is changing. There are many of us, old souls and young, that still love to have a newspaper in our hands with a cup of coffee sitting nearby. If you are in your 40’s or better, the local newspaper is Americana. There’s got to be at least one Norman Rockwell painting somewhere with dad on the couch, newspaper in hand, smoking a pipe with legs crossed while the kids sit on the floor watching TV.
But life is different in 2025 and we know that.
CherryRoad Media CEO Jeremy Gulban told the Grand Forks Herald that the Crookston Times (Crookston is about 20 miles southeast of Grand Forks) struggled to find writers and the business community no longer saw the paper as something of value. “We kind of looked at all this and said, ‘We’re not really proud of the product we’re putting out here anyway. We’re not having anybody local, (and) we’re losing all the advertising. It’s pretty clear we’re not serving a purpose, so we should probably stop trying to do this.’ ”
So what does that mean to us?
When Scott Hennen and I bought the Farmer from Neal and Lisa Shipman about 3 years ago, we knew that newspapers did not have an easy road in the “high tech hurry up” era that we now live in. And we knew that the advent of digital media meant most of us don’t want to “wait til Wednesday” to get our information, even if nobody else in the community was putting content out there like the local newspaper did.
But a lot has changed in three years and the road slants uphill a little more all the time.
Inflation has caused the price of everything we buy to go up, same as you. Insurance, utilities, taxes, well…you know the drill. We love our staff and want to take care of them, but those costs are rising too.
It’s hit our industry hard, and you don’t have to look far, even in Northwest North Dakota, to find newspaper offices now boarded up and empty that just a couple years ago were serving their communities as the only local media in town.
There are no easy answers, but we love a good fight. It’s the spirit of the Bakken. So, we’re putting on the boxing gloves. But we need your help.
Our company is launching a complete overhaul of what we do and how we do it. We will still continue to print a newspaper each week (we like those mornings with the paper just like you do,) but we have revamped our website and created a new mobile app that, combined with the resources of AM 1090 The Flag, allows us to be a daily news service rather than a weekly one. We have a meteorologist on staff who will create fresh forecasts with live weather radar. We are creating a statewide news bureau that will feed stories to our website and app as soon as they are written. Our website, which used to mirror the paper with stories posted once a week, will now have news, weather, features, events, and sports stories posted daily. There will still be a PDF version of the newspaper available on our website for subscribers, but the news cycle is now officially running 7 times faster.
It’s the best way we know to give you a product that means something to you, and meets you where you are in your busy life.
But here’s where we need your help.
We need to continue to make the Farmer a news source with content that you don’t want to miss. If we do that, we believe this community will continue to support the Farmer, whether you are a business person who wants to know what’s happening in your market, a parent of a high school athlete or 4-H member who wants to see our young people be honored for what they do, a rancher who wants to see stories about ag issues that matter, an oil field worker who wants to see honest stories about the value of North Dakota energy, or anyone else who just wants to know what’s happening in the county.
We are betting that there will always be an audience for good stories and great content. But we won’t know if we’re over the target without your advice.
We need to hear from you, to know if we are serving you well. If we do, subscriptions will be strong and businesses will want to promote their companies. And then we all win.
So, I’d like to ask a favor. Will you please download the new BakkenBuzz app (available and FREE on Google Play and iTunes stores), and review the product you see on the app and the website, watfordcitynd.com. The stories will be free for the next 90 days, so that we can get clear and solid feedback from our entire community.
Look closely, and be honest with us. Are we creating a news source that you don’t want to be without? That you can’t do without?
If the answer is yes, let us know what you like. We’ll try to do more of it.
If the answer is no, let us know what needs to improve.
Any thoughts you have can be sent by email to mcf@watfordcitynd.com. I promise you that your comments will be read and considered and I also promise that we will personally respond.
These changes are only part of our story. We have also invested heavily in our marketing tools to help local businesses and organizations build their brands, recruit more talent, or support the causes you love. These affordable solutions include newspaper, radio, website, social media, digital advertising and even Connected TV.
This is a crucial time for the McKenzie County Farmer. We are extremely bullish on our community and our region. The optimism in the business community, the energy industry, and the farm and ranch community puts a spring in our step. So this is the perfect time to reinvent the McKenzie County Farmer. And we think we have.
But if the Farmer doesn’t matter to you, it doesn’t much matter what WE think. So, let us know how we’re doing. And if you aren’t a regular subscriber, please let us know why.
The Crookston Times had been serving that community for 150 years. Imagine that, and the history there that’s been lost. The Farmer has been here for more than 100 years, ourselves. And now, more than ever, we need your help to make sure that we’re writing those stories for another 100.
Visit www.watfordcitynd.com and subscribe to the McKenzie County Farmer today!