Read and weep: Four newspapers in northwest Minnesota shutter

GONVICK, MINN. - Working at a small-town newspaper in northern Minnesota means driving a side-by-side into the office. Susan Sims has done it for a decade.

If you got the paper, you knew it was Wednesday. And if it was Monday, Sims was helping lay out the pages. She said tears were shed Tuesday as they sent final editions of four weeklies to print.

“It is bittersweet,” Sims said. “It’s going to be odd not having Monday to do the paper. It’s just sad to see it go, you know, people are really sad about it, but they understand. They’re supportive.”

In this pocket of the state made up of farm fields and oil pipelines, the news desert has expanded its reach. A fall study found Minnesota lost 34% of newspapers in the past 20 years, mostly in rural areas like Clearbrook and Gonvick, 40 miles northwest of Bemidji.

Dick and Corinne Richards, the publisher and editor of the Leader-Record, have owned the papers for more than 50 years. Both are in their early 80s.

“There isn’t a solution to solve the problems we have, and it’s just the way it is,” Dick Richards said Wednesday, with his ink-stained fingers paging through the final editions spread across his desk.

The decline of subscribers and advertising led to their decision. Between the Leader-Record, Grygla Eagle, Red Lake County Herald and McIntosh Times they had 2,500 subscribers. Not long ago they had double that.

Ending the newspapers follows closures of the Crookston Daily Times, founded in 1885. It ceased publication in February. The Cass Lake Times ended publication in 2023 after it first published in 1899. For small-town papers still in production, many have cut back to printing once or twice a week.

The Clearbrook Leader began printing in 1917, then came the Gonvick Record in 1946. They merged in 1956.

In 1972, Dick and Corrine Richards were living in Inver Grove Heights when Dick said he got a call asking them to return to northern Clearwater County.

“The banker called up and said, ‘You’ve got to come home, come back.’ And we did,” although it was foolishness coming back “to a bankrupt business in Gonvick,” he said.

Corrine chimed in: “What were we thinking?”

They don’t claim to be high school sweethearts, but they did hold hands on the Clearbrook school bus on their 1960 senior class trip to Minneapolis. Corrine became a teacher, and Dick wanted to be a photographer, but instead he was encouraged to study lithography.

She didn’t plan on being a hometown journalist, but she penned Corrine’s Corner column for decades and covered countless school board meetings. Along with designing the layout of photos from annual events, weddings and obituaries, she would advertise a neighbor’s request to borrow a copy of a particular book or remind folks of an upcoming class reunion.

Now they wonder where the legal notices will go or how folks will know about funeral services. Readers will no longer clip photos of their grandkids from the paper to turn yellow on the refrigerator over time.

The closure came with little fanfare. It was announced in a column earlier this month and on Facebook this week, when a reader dropped off a hanging basket of pansies. Readers online thanked them for serving their communities for 50 years and preserving history. Brenda Skime, 61, of Bemidji said she still has news clippings from growing up in Gonvick. Others said they won’t realize how much they will miss the paper until it’s gone.

The Richardses stopped by the Pine Lake Lodge on Wednesday for dinner. They matter-of-factly told the waitress and a few other diners that they sent the last editions of the paper. And as the waitress handed over the menus, they said new ones would be ready for the restaurant any day.

Their commercial printing business in Gonvick will stay open. They say it’s profitable, unlike the newspapers. Richards Publishing Co. prints manuals and tags for Polaris and Indian Motorcycles, posters, calendars and menus for area businesses in Bemidji and Red Lake Nation, among other clients. They will continue working with them until they retire, someday.

Newsrooms in McIntosh, Grygla and Oklee closed this past week. Each location had one employee.

Kari Sundberg, the editor and writer of the Grygla Eagle, said it’s emotional saying goodbye after a dozen years running the newspaper in the town of 200 people.

“The little hometown paper feel — it’s something different, you know, it’s really just special,” she said.

Sundberg said delivering a weekly paper with news that was seven days old got hard to believe in. “Yet it is so heartwarming and fun to deliver the good news to people that want to cut it out, put it on their fridge,” she said.

“Looking at the numbers, it just didn’t make sense to keep it going. And Dick and Corrine, they should have been enjoying retirement for 20 years already, but they love it. They love it so much. So, it’s been tough, but we kind of knew it was coming.”

Sundberg is launching a digital news source, the Northern Neighbor, on June 16 to continue sharing community happenings and human interest stories on Facebook and YouTube.

“We can still place our information in the palm of everyone’s hands,” she said.