Newspaper closures leaves void in state

It made me want to weep.
The grinding decline of the traditional newspaper business continued in an incredibly sad way last week with news that the Brookings Register, Huron Plainsman, Moody County Enterprise and Redfield Press have closed.
The papers are/were owned by News Media Corp., based in Illinois. I know very little about that company beyond the fact that it closed four South Dakota papers that mattered, apparently with no advance notice for employees and no continuing health coverage or certainty that the staffers will be paid all of what they’re owed.
No time for employees to plan, to seek other work, to set up alternative health insurance or reorganize finances. Just “Boom. We’re done. You’re done. Good luck.”
How can people treat other people that way? Apart from everything else, it’s just shoddy behavior. Cruel, even, although not particularly unusual in the corporate media world of today.
Any journalist for any length of time in South Dakota has likely had some contact with one or the other of these four newspapers. Meaningful contact. Here I’ll name just a few.
My old friend Roger Larsen, a former colleague at the South Dakota State University student newspaper, the Collegian, worked at the Huron Plainsman for more than 40 years, doing the kind of journalism that served the news business and his community well. He did some work at the Brookings Register while in college, too.
Then there’s Castlewood farm kid Chuck Raasch, who worked at the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls before heading to the Washington, D.C., area, where he wrote for USA Today, Gannett News Service and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But his first job out of college was at the Huron Plainsman. He also worked  part time at the Brookings Register during his college years.
I shot pictures for the Register while I skipped classes at SDSU and worked at the Collegian on campus. And my first full-time news job was as staff photographer at the Register. There I enjoyed working with reporter and Lake Preston’s own Rob Swenson, who later worked at the Argus Leader before, during and after I was there.
My friend and former Rapid City Journal editor Steve Miller — also a Castlewood native — worked at the Brookings Register way back when. So did my friend and Lyman County compatriot Noel Hamiel, a newspaper writer, editor and publisher who grew up on a farm a couple of miles down the creek from ours. Like my brother, Terry, and me, Noel found a professional life in covering the news rather than raising grain and cattle.
And he began with the Plainsman, which he says “opened the door for me in neMy wife, Mary Garrigan, worked as a reporter and editor at several South Dakota papers during her journalism career. But her first newspaper job was at the Brookings Register during her freshman year at SDSU. She worked in the Register’s mail room and “stuffed a lot of papers back then.”
My friend and gifted poet Doug Cockrell got some of his words-matter training at the Redfield Press, proving that, yes, journalism and poetry can mix, and probably should. Surely I have a Moody County Enterprise connection. I just can’t think of it.
These papers helped educate many journalists and gave others their start or years of employment. More importantly, they mattered supremely to their communities by informing, educating, entertaining and holding those in power accountable.
At this point, we can only hope the suddenly laid-off employees get their final paychecks and can find affordable health insurance and other journalism jobs, if more journalism is what they want.
The best thing will be if those jobs and those people return to those four papers because someone with vision and financial resources revives them. There is some work going on now to see if that’s possible.
If it’s not, we can hope that someone comes up with other ways — such as the startup publications now operating in other towns and cities or news nonprofits — to provide professionally produced journalism to those communities, which they need and deserve.
This is important stuff. Each newspaper that closes is a loss to the very foundations of our democracy.
As a lapel pin offered by the South Dakota NewMedia Association reads, “Democracy Demands Journalism.” That’s especially true at a time when facts and truth are under relentless attack from social-media manipulators and fib-fabricating politicians.
So I’ll weep for the four papers that closed last week. But I’ll also hold out hope that the professional news gap can be filled, one way or another, in those communities and others that have lost their newspapers.
Because when real news produced by real-news professionals goes away, the void is usually filled by something that is much less than professional, often wrong and sometimes downright dangerous.
And that’s bad for our state and our nation.
Kevin Woster grew up on a farm near Reliance and worked for decades as a journalist, including stops at the Brookings Register, Sioux Falls Argus Leader, Rapid City Journal, KELO-TV and South Dakota Public Broadcasting, plus freelance assignments for outdoors and agricultural magazines. He lives in Rapid City.
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.