Reed Anfinson: Publisher and Editor of the Swift County Monitor-News This interview was conducted on Jan.

26, 2011. Jon Collins: Thanks for taking the time to share valuable information. Reed Anfinson: My pleasure. Collins: The best place to start is at the beginning. Anfinson: I grew up in a newspaper family. My father, Ronald Anfinson, bought the Swift County Monitor and Swift County News in 1960. I was 6 years old at the time, and we would run down to the newspaper from time to time and my father would use us as child labor, to insert inserts into newspapers that came off the press, which until 1969 was in the Monitor News office. And even after that the paper would come back and we would do inserting, and I can clearly remember there was a bottle of glycerin with a hole in the top of the cap. You'd put the glycerin on your fingers to make them a little tackier so the inserts wouldn't slip as you were trying to put them into the newspapers. That was my introduction to the newspaper business. Of course, having a father who lived the newspaper business, you absorbed many things along the way. When I was graduated at Benson High School I had no intention of going into journalism. Collins: How did your father get in to the newspaper business? Anfinson: My father had returned from WWII. He had been a bombardier in a B-24, flying out of England over Europe. He had attended the University of Minnesota in English, and loved English literature and poetry, but was working for my grandfather, who was in construction and plumbing. It was known that he had a literary background, and the newspaper came up for sale in Benson, or actually my dad was given a job as the editor at the newspaper by the guy who owned it because of my dad's literary background. A partner Jim Kinney, and my dad, bought it in 1960. Collins: That's very educated for a newspaperman of that era, isn't it? Anfinson: Well a lot of newspaper people were printers or advertising people businesspeople. You didn't have a lot of newspaper owners who were literary as a main focus. But that was my father's forte, and he brought in other people to work the business end to a certain degree and the advertising end of the business. Collins: That's interesting. Did that change the way he covered the community? Anfinson: I think so. I think if you're a writer, and you have the sensitivities of a writer, you do more in depth. Newspapers can hire journalists or writers who are very good, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the editorial page of a newspaper. Where when the owner of a newspaper is writing about issues in the community, it's a little more forceful when he writes about politics or issues rather than just a column about this and that. Collins: Did he do most of the reporting?

Anfinson: He did a lot of the reporting and a lot of the writing early on. Collins: Did other people pick that up as time went on? Anfinson: It wasn't a very big staff. There was one other person, Steve Kufrin was his name. Steve was the sports editor but also wrote general news and feature stories as well. Collins: What sort of work environment did they have? Anfinson: The work environment back at that time was... I guess I'd use the word hellacious, in a sense. I mean, it was the hot lead era. You had the big press sitting in the building. The building was pretty wide open except for the front office. The smells of lead heating, of the solvents they used to clean the ink. You had the job shop there too with the small presses, the Chandler & Price presses and the other sheet-fed small presses. A lot noisier than it is today because you had many moving parts. Just as an aside, the newspaper was a fascinating place for kids to take tours of. All those moving parts, and the smells, and just the scenery would captivate the kids. Today they walk into a newspaper office and they just see people sitting at computers. It could be any office in any business. It's not quite the same. Collins: Do you remember when they would go out and report the story? Anfinson: The way you report a story in a small town is you go out and cover the meeting. You come back, and back in those days you'd type it on a typewriter. That typed sheet would go to a compositor, a typesetter, who would early on type it into a linotype. After the linotype it was the compugraphics, and between the linotype and the compugraphics were the machines that would set a computer tape, and that computer tape would then be fed into a machine that did a photo typeset copy that they would then wax and paste up on a board. After that, along came the compugraphic, the Comp 4, which again you'd take your copy, write it on a typewriter, could be a Selectric now, and you hand that copy off to somebody else who sets it again, and it comes out on a piece of photographic paper, and it gets corrected and re-done. Actually what they would do is the single lines. You don't want to take a two-foot piece of photographic paper and throw the whole thing. You'd print that line and paste it in over the top of the other one and you'd get your corrected copy. Collins: That's progress, right? Anfinson: That was progress. Collins: And now, essentially how do you all send it to the printer? Anfinson: Back in the days when I would write it and give it to a typesetter, we had an area of the business that was for all paste-up. I would get done with my stories and hand them off and they'd go out. A lot of the paste-up was done by staff. Today, I write my stories, I lay out about 7 of the 22 pages there's so much more that the editor does because of the change in technology. I get done with my stories, I take them into another program, Adobe Illustrator in this case. Put them in there, plop the photographs or graphics or whatever else I have, and the page is proofed, the headline's proofed, the cutline's proofed, and it's sent off to one of my other staff people who then runs a distilling program through it, checking for any PDF

problems or type problems, and sends it electronically directly to the printing plant. Collins: What did you go to school for? Anfinson: Originally I went to the U and was thinking along the lines of marine biology, which I loved. I'd taken all the biology, chemistry, math and physics our high school offered, which was very good. We had some great teachers there. But at the University of MN in my sophomore year, I found out that organic chemistry and myself did not get along that great, and after a particularly poor experience with a professor in one class, in the case where he had told a student in the class that the student had asked a question that was so dumb that if the student had to ask that question, they didn't belong in the class. I didn't know the answer either. So I went over and my sister had been in the University of Minnesota school of journalism, and I went over there and enrolled there. Literature and history came naturally to me you had to make an effort, but it was easy compared to chemistry and physics. Collins: Was that your family background then? Anfinson: Well, a lot of my dad's background is that way, but my mother's a dietician, graduated the University of Minnesota in dietetics. My grandfather was a graduate of the University of Minnesota and was a county extension service agent, had a master's degree in soil sciences from the University of MN in the early 1900s. So there was some math and chemistry and science in our family, but on the other side was very literary. My dad was an incessant reader he could read a book a night sometimes. We all picked that habit up. Collins: What was journalism school like at that time? Anfinson: When I came into the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communications, it was shortly after the Watergate era, and journalism was very popular as a result. Everyone wanted to be a Woodward or a Bernstein. Because of the finite size of the classes in journalism a teacher can only grade so many papers, can only read so many stories there were two different tests you had to pass to get into the school. One was basically like a two-hour SAT or ACT test in English, and your command of the English language. The other one was a 25-minute typing test. 25 words per minute, and you could only have so many errors, and it was on a manual typewriter. To get into your next level of courses, your junior year and higher courses, you had to pass a 40 word a minute test, and that was on an electric typewriter. It changed that quick. So you had to pass those two different tests. The professor would stand in front of you and give you a fact sheet, and say, Here are 30 facts. Some are contradictory, some are wrong, you need to use our resources that we provide you in order to find out if they're true or not. Then write us a story, and you got half an hour to do it. So we'd all sit there and furiously type out our stories, but you couldn't sit there and peck away and get through the class. You had to have a command of the keyboard. COLLINS: That seems interesting, as a graduate of the University of MN also, as far as basic skills of being able to type, etc. that make it a trade. ANFINSON: Well, kids these days of course learn to keyboard as soon as they can get on a keyboard. So keyboarding back in high school, there were typing classes that taught people

how to type and use keyboards. COLLINS: After you finished school, what direction were you thinking of taking? ANFINSON: I had no intention of going back to Benson, as most young people do not intend to go back to the small town they grew up in. I got a job shortly after graduating from the University of Minnesota at the Minnesota Legislature. However, there were 6 months in between, and I went to work at a scrap metal yard in North Minneapolis, for 6 months. And went from standing out in a muddy, oily, green-fluid filled field at Mickey Minter's Scrap Metal Yard, tearing alternators and starters off cars, to starting that Monday at the state legislature. I started out serving on two committees there, but the job I applied for, the person who got it ahead of me, left, shortly afterward. So I worked with a guy named Mike Dean on the DFL Media Caucus. My job was to send out news releases and radio clips, where you would do a radio interview with somebody, screw off the microphone part of the phone, clip a couple alligator clips to the contacts in there, and you'd feed the audio from your recording over to radio stations. COLLINS: Pretty high tech at the time! ANFINSON: Pretty high tech at that point (chuckles). I worked there for a session and then a guy named Gene Wenstrom, who was a representative from the Elbow Lake area for Congress. I became his press secretary. Not too long into that work, we both realized that I couldn't write propaganda, and he needed somebody to write propaganda, in a sense. Whereas I tried to tell him, If you write this story in a news way, incorporating your name, more newspapers will run it. But when you start out 'Gene Wenstrom's wonderful' with every single story, newspapers are going to throw it. His chief of staff and I decided that I'd better do something else. At that point my dad's health wasn't the greatest, so I went back to Benson just for a while. And I started taking Spanish classes at the University of MN-Morris, which was only 24 miles away, thinking that eventually I would try to get a job with AP or somebody, somewhere where I could use Spanish. And my dad's health just continued to deteriorate over time, and I just never left Benson. I stayed there and in 1990 I bought the newspaper. Actually, my brother and I bought it he was the advertising manager at that point. He'd been there for five years. I'd been there for ten. But then I bought him out five years later. COLLINS: There aren't that many family-owned newspapers anymore, are there? ANFINSON: It's extremely unfortunate. The majority of newspapers in Minnesota today are owned by corporations. Many of them are big corporations like Gatehouse or the Fargo Forum. COLLINS: How does that impact the newspaper's mission? ANFINSON: I think taking the owner out of the community, takes somebody who's vested in the community out of the community. I'm vested in that community, I'm vested to return money to the community, I'm invested to return my best effort because I'll get jumped on by people who know me I've lived in the community a long time. One little case of the Gatehouse paper I was talking to the publisher of the Gatehouse paper, which is a town of

5000, who has, just like us, its own circulation system in the community. We use kids and we distribute newspapers. And on a particularly brutally cold day, when it was ten below zero and the wind was blowing and it was a tough day for the kids, and I gave them all a five dollar bonus, cash on top of what they'd be making anyway. He would get fired if he were to do the same thing. He had no ability to reward the kids. That's just one small example of how it takes away the touch you have with the community. COLLINS: What's the relationship like of an editor of a small family-owned newspaper with the community? ANFINSON: They know what you wrote, although I don't byline my stories. The reason I don't byline them is because week after week, almost every front page story I've written. Through the years, 90% of the stories on the front page of the newspaper are mine. And that's just overkill, when you see 5 or 6 cutlines with the same guy's name on them. So I don't byline them, but people know it. They feel a sense of ownership themselves the newspaper's not mine, necessarily it's the community's. When I write things, I get input from them. I'm approachable. If I'm talking to the editor of a big daily, a big group ownership, you can talk to that person and they can receive what you say, but they have to pass on any major responses to corporate. Where, in Benson, it stops with me. I make the decision of yes or no, if we print something or don't, go somewhere and take a photograph or don't. And I catch the heat for it. COLLINS: What's the relationship of sources at a smaller paper? ANFINSON: Sources are maybe your city manager. Sources are people who are involved in stories. They generally trust me to be fair and honest. I think they trust that ethically I will respect confidences. Many know, for example, if I'm sitting somewhere and we start talking about something confidential after the fact, my wife will say, I didn't know that. Then they know I didn't tell her. If someone tells you something in confidence, that means you don't tell anybody. COLLINS: Does that relationship get complicated at times? ANFINSON: The relationship gets complicated at times. Where the relationship really gets complicated is with the power structure in a sense. I remember I was back in Benson and the newspaper in Benson hadn't covered the county commission, really. And they were really an old world power structure. And I started covering their meetings, and I did a story that was critical of some actions they had taken. And one of the old-time businesspeople came into my office and sat down next to me and said, Who the hell are you to criticize the county commissioners? Literally thought it was out of line for the newspaper to question the local power. It's still that way today in a certain sense. You have not a confrontational, but you can never let that line slip, where my job is to report on you, and your job is to tell the public what you're doing with public funds, and why. You can't get too cozy with them, but that can really happen in small towns where the publisher's been around for a long time. COLLINS: Public service mission you don't hear often from the bigger papers. ANFINSON: Public service mission is huge for a community newspaper. That's another place I think is lost with corporate ownership. If we're building a new swimming pool to replace what

we have, I have to report on that factually. But on the editorial page, I can also take an advocacy position and say here's why we need this. Last week, the community approved a $50,000 economic development loan, which is going to be forgiven over 5 years, the whole amount, to buy the local theater. This couple came along to propose to buy the theater as a sideline. The owner is 74-years old, he could quit at any point and walk away, and nobody would buy the place because it needs at least $200,000 of renovations and new equipment. And we would lose it, simply. But the community saw we needed to keep the theater in the community, and I supported that vigorously. COLLINS: For instance, a theater in a community, some people will say compared to war in Iraq, that's small potatoes. But what's the impact if this influence you have is gone? ANFINSON: There are a growing number of towns without newspapers. That is challenging for a community identity, but the more important thing is that it threatens democracy. It threatens democracy in a number of ways. In communities in which newspapers no longer exist, participation in elections falls. Tip City, Florida is one example. They saw that participation in social events fell. People weren't attending as many things. You have communities like Bell, CA, which has become very prominent. Where the city council pays itself exorbitant salaries because nobody was covering the Tip City Council. You have examples of that all over the country. When I started at the Monitor News, nobody was covering the county board. There was a deal going on where abandoned properties went to the county, the county would then auction off the properties. Well, one person there was auctioning off the properties minus some things he would take out from time to time, saying it was worth 5, 10, 15 dollars, and he'd put that worth down. However, a citizen came up and told me in confidence, I think what those 5, 15 dollar things are, are $500 antiques. So we looked into it, did some stories on it. The process by which those properties were auctioned was changed. Inventories were done ahead of time, of all the things, and nothing was bought by county employees prior to the sale. COLLINS: Public idea that journalism takes away people's trust in democracy. Is that really the way it is? ANFINSON: Just the opposite. Journalism gives people trust in democracy. That's its role. Take Benson, without a newspaper. We have a levy referendum and they want to raise half a million dollars to support education. Without the newspaper there to lay out here's the cost per household, here's the reason they want to do it, here are the pros and cons, what you're going to have instead is the pro-levy referendum people, and they'll give you their point of view. That would be the teachers, the teachers union, and the school board. On the other side, you're going to have the people who oppose it. And their reasoning is they don't want taxes to go up. And a number of them don't want those teachers to make any more money than they're already making because they're overpaid, and there's no balance. There's nobody to give you both sides. You're going to get the screaming at either end, and nobody to lay it out for you. The other big thing that happens is you lose your sense of community. In other words, what the newspaper does is it reaches the community. It creates, you're hoping, a community common agreement on what's good or bad for our community. Without the newspaper, where are you going to reach that consensus? Where does everybody read about what's going on, to develop their own opinions and give their input on the community as a whole? If

everybody ends up in their own silos, you tear each other apart and you're polarized. And that's happening in a lot of places around the country. Newspapers create a square, a common place for people, unlike the internet does. One of the ways I compare what's happening today compared to the past in the newspaper is, early on you had a person, a town crier standing in the center of the square, yelling out the news and people gathered and would listen to the town crier and listen to the news. Today that town square is packed and the people line up through the streets into the hills and every one of them are shouting at that person standing in the middle of the square. And he or she is trying to pick out the voices that are relevant, that are truthful, sincere, and meaningful. And that's what we have today. COLLINS: Gatekeeper... ANFINSON: People decry the gatekeeper role, people who don't like newspapers. They say, Who are they to decide what we need to read? Well, what newspapers do is they take an overwhelming amount of information and they do look at what's relevant to you in your life. What Paris Hilton is doing isn't necessarily relevant to democracy. The speech last night, the state of the union speech by Barack Obama, is important. How the Republicans respond, how the Democrats assessed it, how the Tea Party with Michele Bachmann looked at it, those are all relevant stories. The same thing at the local level. If you wanted to do what's popular, we could have all sports maybe. But we need to also put in there the county commission, the school board, and the city council meetings. The local public bodies and what they're up to and what they're doing with taxpayers' money. COLLINS: In your years there, how has the community changed? ANFINSON: The demographics of the community changing hasn't changed anything about the way we do things. I would say that the demographics changed in the sense that we have new people. However we're not like some communities, like Wilmer for example, which now have a quarter of their student populations Hispanic and maybe thirty percent of their student population is Hispanic and Somali. We don't, we're still almost purely Scandinavian/European-based. We haven't had to deal with that issue of how we reach a Hispanic population as well as our own. Even Sauk Center has tried to do some Spanish language articles in their newspaper. COLLINS: New populations. ANFINSON: In the 1950s, Swift County reached its peak population of about 15,000. Today we're closer to 10,000. When I graduated from Benson High School in 1972, the total school populated peaked at 1900. Today we're under 1000, K-12, and we've added several other school districts. So that's a challenge. We're having to reach a broader area with fewer people. COLLINS: How is since you started in the field, the reputation for this changed? ANFINSON: The reputation is you have to split it into different categories. You have the national media, especially today so many national outlets are polarizing Fox or MSNBC. Even within ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, people see categories of liberal and conservative. The NY Times and the Washington Post, and the LA Times the major media, the national media are seen as one side or the other. The big deal is even the Pioneer Press is perceived

as more conservative than the Star Tribune. But in a small town, you're too local. You can perceive it that way, but you're just right in the local news basically. On the editorial page, you write your opinion and then people see it there. COLLINS: A different approach. ANFINSON: It's a different approach. We're not the same as the big dailies. COLLINS: Part of what the national media does is they want to gather these... ANFINSON: Generally the NY Times and publications like the Times, despite how they're categorized, really want to do a top-notch professional job of giving you the news without skewing it. The public, a lot of times, just wants to know that you are being honest and straightforward. Sometimes they don't understand how you go about doing what you do. The 8 years I served on the MN News Council, listening to complaints against the media, was educational. It taught me what people's concerns were, and in writing and doing my job trying to respond to those ideas more, those thoughts and concerns. COLLINS: Adjusting to technology? ANFINSON: We have a website, but we put minimal information on the website. The difference between the Star Tribune and St. Cloud, and even Benson is that nobody covers Benson other than me. If I put it all on the website, and everybody drops their subscriptions to read it free on the website, it destroys my ability to provide the news. Because I can't afford to hire people, can't afford to stay in business, can't afford to go to those meetings myself. So for a small newspaper to give its information away online is suicidal. The value's there. Nobody's going to replace the Swift County Monitor News in Benson. You've got these Patches springing up around the country. But the Patch network of newspapers isn't in communities of 3500. If you wanted to support yourself in Benson with online advertising, you wouldn't earn that much. It wouldn't be enough to support a person and a family. And there would be a high burnout rate. COLLINS: What are your hours like and how have they changed? ANFINSON: My hours have been long. Throughout the years. Because we're short-staffed. We're short-staffed because we can't afford to hire a bunch of people. So I wear many hats, and it's a lot of weekends where things come up, a lot of nights. Fifty hours in a week is not unheard of. It's pushed 60 at times. Until 1984, the Swift County Monitor and the Swift County News were two newspapers. One came out on Wednesday, one came out on Friday. So we were a twice-weekly. In 1984, we went to the Swift County Monitor News, a weekly publication. Basically because postal costs were skyrocketing and it just wasn't affordable to put out two newspapers. The wear and tear on the staff and the equipment and the costs were prohibitive. COLLINS: What does it feel like to see the product? ANFINSON: Maybe at this point I'm a little jaundiced. I think this is my thirtieth year at the newspaper it's hard to believe. I've put out so many newspapers, and the hardest part is going on vacation. If I go on a vacation, I write everything I can for that week's newspaper. I

write a lot for the week afterward feature stories, stories that aren't as time-sensitive, although I do have somebody if there's breaking news who can cover that. And then when I get back, I probably work several 15-hour days to catch up. COLLINS: You're used to these hours by now? ANFINSON: Oh yes, we go to press Tuesday, so I'm always working a little on Saturday if there's something going on. Sunday night I try and write for several hours. Monday's generally a seven am to ten pm, or 10:30 day. COLLINS: Has that changed since your father's day? ANFINSON: Back then, with the press and printing our newspaper at our plant rather than at a remote location in Lowry, Minnesota. They were there watching that press work, in case anything went wrong. COLLINS: What are the stories that stand out to you? ANFINSON: There are stories that stand out that really epitomize what a small newspaper is about, and why community journalism is so different from the big dailies, and why we have a better chance of surviving. Take the story of a guy like Marv Maulk [spelling?], who was a meat-cutter and owned a SuperValu in Benson. Marv was a Marine, WWII, at Guadalcanal and New Georgia. Some of the worst places you could possibly be. Marv was laying in a foxhole in Guadalcanal with dysentery, so sick that he doesn't know if he wants to live or die. But each morning they do fear dying because at night the Japanese would sneak into the camp, climb a palm tree, and open fire on the people in the camp. They knew they were gonna die, but they wanted to see how many people they could take with them before they died. And after Guadalcanal, on to New Georgia and right through the Philippines and the different islands. So we were able to do stories on a man like him. We were able to do a story on a mother and her child, who was going through a second bout of cancer, and the struggle and the pain and the way the community steps up to help that family. Those are stories that make differences, or the story about the man named Doren Jurgenson [spelling?], who I wrote a story on this past summer, who calls me up and says, I was digging a well on my farm, and I brought up wood from 202 feet down. And everybody pauses a second and says, 202 feet down, what could be down there? And he's calling me because my brother is Scott Anfinson, the Minnesota state archaeologist, and he figures Scott can give some answers. And I call Scott and say, What is this wood? And he goes, Well that's easy. 12,000 years ago the glacier swept through this area, as glaciers sweep, and flattened a forest. It's probably 10-15,000 year-old wood. But I have somebody's name I want you to call, at the US Geological Survey, who specializes in this. Meanwhile I'm doing some research on glaciations and their periods, and we're looking at maybe this could be 30,000 years old. Then I talk with the person the story's written with this 15-30,000 year-old figure in there so I talk to the person at the US.. Geological Survey, and she says, Reed, the wood's half a million years old. It's 500,000 years old. And I said, How is that possible? I can flex this wood in my hand. It's wet. She said, Well it's 200 feet down, anaerobic oxidation, high

pressure. Sure it could still be flexible. So I write the story, but now Doren Jurgenson in his community is somebody who's talked about. And people are fascinated with, here's somebody from our community, here's their interesting story. Without the community newspaper, the story of the little girl with leukemia, the story of Marv Maulk's service in Guadalcanal, and the story of Doren Jurgenson where are those stories told? They create a sense of community, and a sense of belonging, and a sense a purpose within that community. It raises their stature in the community, but it also raises our stature. It gives us a chance to say thank you to them, interact with them. It brings out things within our community that we feel good about. COLLINS: And if you hadn't gone to the length you did in reporting that, would it have been something? ANFINSON: No, you have to seek out those stories. You have to write them. Community journalism, as one person has put it, is relentlessly local. That's what we're about. It's the feature stories, the feel-good stories, but also the tough stories. About somebody locally prominent doing something they get nailed on. It's the stories where we carry the county court news, and the happenings with people who are sentenced, and different things. I've had people over the years come to me and say, Please leave my name out. And I have to say, If I leave your name out, I have to leave everybody's name out. We have to be fair here. I'll lose my job, I'll lose my wife, or whatever. But then I can point to the fact that my name's been in the court news, and my mother's, and my father's, and my wife's, and I can say, Why should I leave you out? ANFINSON: Yes, especially when you're writing a story about somebody or somebody's child in a community that's a family. It's not like I get to write about somebody 15 miles away within the city limits in this huge city, where I walk around the corner grocery store and don't see him face to face. Or, it's the high school student standing on the water tower threatening to jump. And I've got my camera and I go over there now the question is do I take a picture of this high school kid who's threatening to kill himself off this water tower? My initial reaction is no. I'm not going to take this picture. I might take the pictures, but I'm not going to publish them. But after an hour or so, when they've locked down the school, when they've got that part of town cordoned off, the West Central Tribune has arrived with his reporter, now you have to take the picture. But how do you publish the picture? Do you publish a close-up of the face? Or do you take a picture that represents what the community can see? And anywhere in the community with a clear view can see this kid walking around on the railing of the water tower. And so now the parents of this kid are good advertisers of mine too. So what eventually happens is they do talk him down. They bring in a specialist from the prison near us, in hostage negotiations, and talks this kid down. It ends happily from that standpoint, but now you've got to report on it. And you've got to report on it in a way that answers the community's anxiety and fears, answers the questions that the schoolkids have, and you have to publish those stories along with a photograph of a silhouette of a young man standing on a water tower. And then the next spring, when you're golfing early in the morning, you walk up to the green to put, and he's standing there because he's working at the golf course. You look at each other and you say hi. And you walk away. That's a small town.

COLLINS: Incidents like that are opportunities, teachable moments? ANFINSON: They're teachable moments in what community journalism is. Teachable moment in here's what you lose. Here's what a community loses without its newspaper. Communities also lose a lot more than that. When you look at the Minnesota Newspaper Association lobbying efforts at the state legislature, at all 50 states' lobbying efforts, and the court cases for freedom of information, the Minnesota Data Practices Act, and the Minnesota Open Meeting Law were basically fought for and crafted by the newspapers in this state. The electronic media has done very, very little along those lines, and we continue to fight those battles. If newspapers go under, so does our lobbying effort. And without us, fighting at the legislature to keep meetings open, and data accessible by citizens, you begin to see those laws erode. If they erode, our rights erode. The worst things that can happen, for example 9/11 all kinds of laws were introduced that would have struck down open meetings and data practices access to a great degree all over the country. But at those times it's especially important that we have a strong influence to say, Wait hold on. We need to keep this information public because it is important. If we're not fighting there with a strong lobbying force, it's gone. Or it erodes. The other thing is, which is going to be harder you work for Patch, and maybe have more experience than some Patch reporters. You walk up and ask the city manager for some information, and the city manager says, No that's not public. And you say, Yes it is. And he goes, No it's not, sue me for it. What's your economic depth to go do that? There's a great quote by Katharine Graham of the Washington Post: Her CFO comes up to her and says, We're down $7 million in revenue since you started this Watergate thing. And her reply is, It's a good thing we can afford it. Who'll say that today under the corporate ownership? Who'll say that under the foundations and grants that keep publications on the internet going? Who's going to say that at Patch? Who's going to say that, in a sense, at the Monitor News in Benson? I can't afford some of those cases, except that the Minnesota Newspaper Association has an attorney that works for it that will step in for us. COLLINS: What's your vision, with internet coming in, where will these issues? ANFINSON: I think we're in big trouble. Let's take in Benson for example. Let's say that I can make 25% of my revenue internet revenue. You might say, that's worth 50% because you don't have the production cost. But I'm maxed out at 50% of what I once had. So I've got to cut half of what I have. How's the internet going to replace a 1200 person staff at the NY Times? The NY state legislature used to be covered by 50 reporters. Today it's 10. There are departments within in Washington, D.C., the department of agriculture many different departments that aren't covered anymore. Don't have people covering very, very important topics. We're losing the news. COLLINS: I covered the capitol for a few years, how has it changed? ANFINSON: It's weaker. If you worked there for a couple years, you know that the rooms that were once full of reporters there, are empty. Uptake just got an office there, and it's not a new office they're filling empty space. They provide, just like Patch any news you provide to a community is important. The problem is your audience. With online, with video, whatever you have to be tuned into it to take part in it. The Monitor News, the printed product, has a uniting effect throughout the community. Everybody doesn't have to subscribe to it. If I walk

into Duffy's Bar & Grill in Benson, on Tuesday night after the paper gets back, that newspaper's being passed, frustratingly, down the bar, with people looking through it. None of them are subscribers. But they're all reading it. They're all reading what are the important stories in the community. So the news processes through the community. I can't share my iPad with the people at the bar if all the stories are on there, or my iPhone. Or the people who can't afford to have those things. If it's on the internet only, and I go on the internet and I have an hour to spend on the internet, or 45 minutes, and I may go to a website that says this is important news, I'm going to read it. I start reading that story, and I see off to my right, Here are the top stories of the day. Those stories are cleavage and Hollywood, and stories that are going to distract me, and after I start reading some of that first story, I start reading over here. Next thing you know I'm responding to some emails, doing some Facebook time my time on the internet's done and I've read half a story that's important to me as a citizen. So there's so much that competes for us as citizens in democracy. COLLINS: We're expected to spend time... What's your impression of how that change has taken away? ANFINSON: It's put us in silos It's put us in places where we seek like-minded people, we seek like-minded information. We don't get as exposed to information that disagrees with what we think. I can't help that. If I pick up the NY Times, or USA Today USA Today is very famous for its editorial page, where it has a point/counterpoint two editorials, two different points of view. You're not gonna find that when you go to internet sites it's much more polarized. Huffington Post is a very good site, but it's got the perception of being a liberal site. There's other sites out there the Daily Beast, but the Daily Beast is aggregated. So is the Huffington Post. Research has looked into where information comes from: 80+%, 90% of information on blogs, like Huffington Post, originated in newspapers. I don't know what our local radio station will do, because they read the newspaper for their news. The local television station up in Alexandria reads all the local newspapers to get their leads. There's a great story if you look at what's happening with news today from Arizona. One person says to another, Isn't it terrible the way crime has gotten so bad? And the guy thinks about it and goes, Crime isn't so bad; in fact, crime rates have fallen. And the guy goes, Well why is there so much news about the crime then? And the response is, Because it's cheap to cover crime. People will watch it. People will be interested in it. And all I have to do is send a reporter to the crime scene, or to the chief of police or the sheriff or whoever, who will say, Can you make a comment on this crime that happened? There's another story that's dismaying. The decline began to fall some time ago with the public's interest in newspapers. One of the Knight-Ridder papers won 7 Pulitzers. Its stock fell that day. The financial officer of Knight-Ridder calls up their person who specializes, and says, Why did our stock fall? He said, You win too many Pulitzers. The investors want the money you invest in Pulitzers to go the bottom line and their returns. That's where we're sitting today. COLLINS: The tension of private ownership... ANFINSON: Corporate ownership has destroyed the news media, just as it destroyed the housing market. It's interested in one thing: Profits. Unfortunately with many of the websites

that have popped up, not the news websites, but Google, Yahoo they recognize to a certain degree that they make their living off newspapers and what newspapers generate. Some of them, like Yahoo is investing in Patch. Google is looking at what different formats it might be able to invest in. But their bottom line is return on their investment dollars. They're not interested in news, they're not interested in replacing the news they've lost. They're interested in the highlights of the news that people will read. They're not going to invest what's lost. The bottom line is there is absolutely no model out there today that can replace what's being lost. The dollars aren't there. Digital dimes for analog dollars, or the print dollar, just can't finance the newsroom anymore. ANFINSON: I think there's a lot of fighting out there for them. Two authors, Nichols and McChesney in their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, write about what needs to be done. We have to go back to the days when Madison and Jefferson realized that we needed to not subsidize the news from the standpoint that we're going to pay you to write stories but we're going to pay you to disseminate news that's valuable to citizens. They did that through a couple of things. They did that through postal; they made it cheap and free almost to mail newspapers. And public notice was also something noticed as an income stream for newspapers. Well, the postal subsidy is gone, almost. It's still there but it's been significantly and severely reduced. Public notice is under threat. Hugely. There's a bill introduced in the MN Legislature this year that will remove public notices from newspapers. If the city of Benson can put its public notices on its website only, how much traffic does the city of Benson have versus that newspaper of mine that goes to subscribers, but also gets passed down the bar? People see it in many different ways. Public notice, published public notice is also archivable. You can go back 120 years in the Monitor News and find public notice. 50 years from now, do you think you could find public notice published today on the internet? Does it get lost out there somewhere? The other thing about public notice is, it's published in a state that you can see. We had another governmental unit in which bids were let for painting a public building. One of the officials of the public building was involved with a company that got the bid co-owner of it. A person accused them of not publishing the public notice and we were able to pull it out and show it was all done right. If I'm in charge of this government unit, and everything's posted online, how easy is it for me to delay posting? How easy can I rig that online? Who's watching? COLLINS: They talk about how the media is... enshrined in the Constitution. Not that many industries enshrined in the Constitution. Public service journalism. What's the tradition? ANFINSON: The only way we're going to keep it alive is the government's gotta get involved. Now that's anathema to people in the news business. How do you involve government without government control? Government control can be subtle. We all know it's happened with NPR and the political right wanting to decimate NPR because they see it as a liberal news media. Yet if you were to watch the Lehrer News Hour, you know it's the most fair news program on television. Jim Lehrer always has somebody from both sides, competent people from both sides, and he simply questions them on issues. And yet there are programs that are seen as very liberal, and they get mad about it, so they want to strip funding from NPR. So what does that set as the ground rules for public funding of any media? Or they want to be able to give you money and say, Here's public money but you can't write editorials.

Which we simply won't accept. It may not be relevant, but one of the ways I think the news media is reacting to government spending, is there's a famous scene from Monty Python's hunt for the Holy Grail, in which the Black Knight is defending the bridge. And he ends up with all four limbs cut off. And he's yelling at the other knight as he walks away, Come back, I'll bite you to death! Well that's the media today. We've been decimated. We're in poor physical shape, but we're screaming, We're just fine! And it's not true. And democracy is at stake. COLLINS: Thank you so much for talking to me. Anything else? ANFINSON: This has been a great chance for me to talk. Probably because I talk about these subjects, talk about the passion, the depth, what I do is, currently I'm the vice president of the National Newspaper Association, I become president in September. So I will be the national spokesperson for community newspapers in America. So I've been doing some homework.