Media mergers in northern Minnesota and beyond

PHOTO: Matt Brown, Flickr CC-BY

By now you may have seen the last column I wrote for the Hibbing Daily Tribune and the first that I penned for the newly merged Mesabi Tribune.

Then last Friday I did a couple interviews about the merger of the Hibbing Daily Tribune and Mesabi Daily News. First I went on the KAXE Morning Show with Heidi Holtan and John Bauer. Then I appeared on WDSE’s Almanac North. You can see that interview below:

Two long-time rival newspapers on the Iron Range, the Hibbing Daily Tribune and Mesabi Daily News merged this week,…

Posted by Almanac North on Saturday, July 11, 2020

The subject in all of this was change in the media landscape in northern Minnesota. But really, this is happening all over the country, especially in medium to small cities and in rural places. While I might make an attempt to put a positive spin on this, the reality is grim and present.

In the Information Age, information is the commodity. If you don’t have the information then you are either the unwitting product or you are being manipulated into buying the product. That product could include the latest cell phone, a political candidate, or fear or distrust of those unlike you. Someone profits from all of these things, almost never you. 

At the local level we are losing touch with our neighbors, our communities, and sometimes even our own families. And that’s because we are not connected with the information that we need to understand where we live and what really matters. 

So we live in our heads, triumphant heroes in a life of political and cultural fiction. 

I didn’t say this in the interviews, so let’s call this the director’s cut. 

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Comments

  1. Cllinton Shafto says

    “At the local level we are losing touch with our neighbors, our communities, and sometimes even our own families. And that’s because we are not connected with the information that we need to understand where we live and what really matters. ”

    I think that is a pretty astute observation and summary of where the majority of problems which exist come from. It’s pretty hard to turn back the clock, cause as you mentioned in a previous post, change happens. It doesn’t feel like there is any clear cut good path in which to make things better right now. Definitely, reconnecting with the communities and families we belong to are a good start. Getting reconnected with ourselves is another. In most cases, that is where the change has to begin, within ourselves, so we can respond to the environment surrounding us. That change within us can be simple, like declaring we’ll no longer support media which isn’t local, or buying local. But those sort of charades haven’t produced a bigger result. What is needed to get that snowball rolling?

  2. “So we live in our heads, triumphant heroes in a life of political and cultural fiction.”

    That’s a deep truth right there — and a strange aspect of the human condition.
    On a shallower note, I hope your newspaper can fend off any advances from Forum Communications. They have homogenized every local paper that they absorb.

    • Gerald S says

      Not just homogenized, destroyed. The Forum formula is to decrease the amount of local news by an order of magnitude, cover popular spectator sports heavily, and use — as you say — homogenized news product brought in from elsewhere to fill a large share of the news space. Currently, the Duluth News-Tribune contains about one-tenth the amount of news it contained in the 1990’s, when it was part of Knight-Ridder, and that news is supplied by poorly paid, poorly trained, and poorly educated young reporters with little to recommend them other than a willingness to make about the same as a McDonald’s counter person. I am always happy to see the byline of a few older reporters who are desperately hanging on.

      Papers complain bitterly about the loss of interest in their product, but then they sabotage themselves and cheat their readers. It’s like finding that the local pizza parlor is now serving “pizza” made on pita bread with Velveeta cheese and ketchup — and charging more for it. “Local” papers that don’t cover important local news and politics, and cover it in a balanced way, forfeit consideration as an important local resource.

      I am heartened to see the Mesabi Tribune still committed to publishing a daily paper, and to seriously trying to cover the news. Too few papers, and none owned by Forum, do that.

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