Up north with newspaper publishers

By Joe Spear
Free Press Editor

I spent last Friday night and Saturday morning with newspaper editors and publishers from around Minnesota at Ruttger's Lodge on Bay Lake near Aikin.

The lodge dates back to 1898 and it's a classic northern Minnesota resort that started as a small family business and had grown to include multi-million dollar villas and condos on the golf course across the street.

It's still run like a family business though and the dining room staff talks about how great it is to work for the Ruttger family.

A beautiful old lodge on a pristine Minnesota lake in the Great Northwoods was the perfect place to gain perspective on the news business with editors and publishers mostly from smaller weekly newspapers in Minnesota. They were participating in the Blandin Foundation's community leadership training program for leaders of "news enterprises."

We changed the terminology to "news enterprises" because even the smallest papers now usually have websites and various other products to distribute.

I was invited as an alum of the program to speak about how we've applied the principles of community leadership to our efforts at The Free Press, or I should say, The Free Press Media Co.

Those of you who monitor The Free Press opinion page know for about six months we have been rating the community on eight dimensions of a healthy community and assessing where we are at and where we need to go to grow our community to make it a better place.

These kinds of motivations have not always been the core of the newspaper and journalism profession. For a long time, the culture of journalism ingrained at J-schools every where was that we were sort of a detached entity in the community that objectively observed what was going on but made few efforts to effect the change.

Parts of our business must still hold true to those principles. We can't slant news coverage just because we'd like the City Council to take one action or another. But there has long been a kind of separation between news and editorial or opinion writing functions.

The opinion page is specifically designed as the place for the newspaper's leaders, usually the editor, publisher and two or three other managers, to voice a "collective" opinion known as the "editorial." We title it "Our View."

People often confuse opinion writing and news coverage. They assume that those who write opinions assign the news stories to fit those opinions. But that's not the way it works.

In fact, our news gathering is very decentralized. Reporters are often encouraged to come up with their own stories. They're out in the community and that's where they should find stories of interest to the community.

That newsroom is directed to write stories about what the broad readership might be interested in. Again, the opinion page remains separate.

Certainly, at smaller newspapers, even at The Free Press, the person who writes the editorials does discuss the news story budget with others. That's part of the role.

But in general, the voice of the newspaper, the opinions, should not be driving the news coverage. If you've ever worked with reporters, you know they can be independents sorts who wouldn't take much from an editor's view anyway.

On the opinion page, we've bought into the idea that a community can be healthier if it strives to achieve the eight dimensions of a healthy community Blandin has been promoting for decades.

There's nothing magical about them. They suggest a community should have economic opportunities for everyone, should have recreational opportunities, should have options for life long learning and the like as well as valuing diversity and being inclusive.

That last dimension is one The Free Press has been working to develop with various groups in the community including the Diversity Council. We've written more stories simply educating the longtime residents about many of their new neighbors who have come from places like Sudan and Somalia.

We'll be developing a whole community conversation around that in months to come, and we're comfortable in our role helping to develop a community that will be great to live in and will hopefully grow and prosper in part because of our efforts.