It Takes A Village - by Cecile Wehrman, NDNA Exec. Director
It Takes A Village To Keep A Local News Source
By Cecile Wehrman
NDNA Executive Director
Another North Dakota newspaper is changing hands and it points to the continued interest of communities to have local news sources.
Ryan and Tabitha Janke will put out their first issue as the new owners of the Ashley Tribune and Wishek Star on Aug. 13.
The papers had been in jeopardy of closing since the unexpected death late last year, of Publisher Tony Bender. Almost simultaneously, Publisher LaVonne Erickson of the Renville County Farmer in Mohall received a terminal cancer diagnosis and the prognosis for that weekly newspaper also looked grim.
What made success stories out of what could have become three more “news deserts” in North Dakota? (News deserts are defined as counties where there is no local news source.)
What made the difference in these cases was, first and foremost, the interest of these communities in retaining their local newspaper. People in Wishek and Ashley and Mohall understood that if the newspapers closed, they were very unlikely to reopen.
NDNA played a role in helping those communities understand what was at risk, but if no one had come to the public meetings to hear about the necessity of maintaining weekly publication in order to retain status as a legal newspaper, it wouldn’t have mattered.
There had to be people who cared about keeping their community’s “first draft of history” as a written record of their town and people who realized what a driver for all of a town’s business a local news source is.
Newspapers are town boosters. They chronicle the awards and accolades of youth through sports and feature reporting; they send reporters to cover the public meetings on city, county and budget issues so everyone else can enjoy their Monday evening doing something else.
Because newspapers curate everything of interest in their locale, they reduce substantially the time any individual needs to spend searching out information on government websites or on social media just to figure out what’s going on.
And because people realized those things, they showed up to talk about how these newspapers could survive.
In Mohall, no less than four different parties seriously looked at a purchase before Rene Duckett and her husband, Mike, pulled the trigger to become the new publishers. She says it’s going great.
For Ashley/Wishek, it took two different serious inquiries before the Jankes became the ones to make sure Ryan’s home area will continue to have a chronicler for the community.
While the Ducketts live in Mohall, the Jankes will be running the papers from Fargo, something made possible by technology and the fact they still have family ties and acquaintances with boots on the ground in the community.
In both cases, as the leader of the newspaper association, I couldn’t be more pleased to see people with roots in these towns take the leap to make sure local news continues to be available.
It’s almost a model for what’s possible and one that, while difficult, can hopefully be replicated any time in the future when a publisher retires, falls ill, or in these two cases, passes away.
It’s also worth noting that in both of these newspaper “rescues” neighboring publishers played significant roles in supporting the operations during the transition periods between owners.
In Mohall’s case, Westhope Publisher Ben Cartwright took on the task of largely laying out the Mohall paper for about three months. In support of Janke, nearby publishers Paul Erdelt of Steele and Terry Schwartzenberger of Napoleon helped the Bender family with advice and expertise. Tony’s kids made sure that paper went out every week even though they have their own fulltime jobs.
All of these people, whether the communities who want news, the neighboring publishers willing to offer help, the families or the people interested in assuming the mantle of ownership, all our heroes in my book. They know it’s a job that comes with criticism and long hours, but they sign up anyway.
It’s an example of what many in the newspaper business call “the weekly miracle.” At times it calls for Herculean effort and the impact is rarely recognized until its absent.
I hope it’s also an example for other communities of how important it is to support your local news sources. Without them, all that’s left is Facebook and TikTok.
And while social media does some things very well, what it can’t do is lay down a permanent record. And that’s a valuable thing for towns of any size to maintain.