What Happened to Small Town Newspapers?

FILLMORE & HOUSTON COUNTIES—The first newspaper printed in Fillmore County was the Fillmore County Pioneer in Carimona, a six-column broadsheet issued on Thursday, June 5, 1856. This was two years before Minnesota became a state and joined the union.

The Pioneer called itself: A Family Newspaper, Neutral in Politics, Devoted to the News of the Day, Mechanics, Agriculture, Education, Morals, etc., etc.

Its front-page first column was devoted to Business Cards, promoting land agents, notary publics, justices of the peace, and attorneys at law. The second column was Select Poetry, including the poems “Carol For May-day” by Bishop Heber and “Love Sickness” by Lovesick Henry. And above the fold was a fictional story filling out the remaining four columns.

The emergence of the Pioneer was soon followed by town papers throughout the county.  There were newspapers in Preston, Rushford, Mabel, Canton, Spring Valley, Lanesboro and other towns. All of them are gone now. Like any business, papers were bought and sold, went out of print, or merged with other papers.

Most small towns had a newspaper in the early days of statehood; one example, the Spring Valley Sun, advertised $1 annual subscriptions. (Image courtesy of Fillmore County Historical Society)

The Chatfield Democrat was formed in 1856, the same year the Chatfield Republican was founded. The Republican later moved to Preston in 1860, becoming the Preston Republican. The Chatfield News was started in 1894 and later merged with the Democrat. The Chatfield News, which is still printing today, remains the longest running newspaper in the county.

In Houston County, meanwhile, the Hokah Chief newspaper was started in 1857 and continued until 1953. Founded in 1879, the Caledonia Argus is the only remaining town paper in Houston County. Gone are the Houston Valley Signal, Hokah Chief, Spring Grove Herald, Brownsville News, La Crescent Banner and others.

Throughout Southeast Minnesota, most towns, no matter how small, had a newspaper back in the day. Of those, The Chatfield News and the Caledonia Argus are the only town papers still in existence in Fillmore and Houston counties.

News deserts

Some papers were lost due to consolidation; others failed when the town became too small to sustain a newspaper as a business. Today, the advertising sales-subscription business model that financed town newspapers is struggling as online media cut into the demand for print.

Online websites like Craigslist, for example, eroded classified ad revenue, an economic staple of newspapers. The Great Recession had the same effect on display ads and the 2022 pandemic sent most readers online.

“News deserts”—places without access to local news coverage—have emerged as a result.

The lack of town newspapers has affected rural areas the most. Without a trusted local source of information, communities tend to see an increase in disinformation and decreases in collective identity and pride.

This Franklin style printing press, which is on exhibit at the Fillmore County Historical Center in Fountain, was manufactured in Ohio in 1825 and used by the Preston Times in 1886. (Image courtesy of Fillmore County Historical Society)

According to research by the University of North Carolina, around 2,500 newspapers disappeared between 2005 and 2022. A recent report by the Center for Rural Policy and Development, a Minnesota public policy nonprofit, found that one-fourth of Minnesota’s newspapers closed between 2000 and 2021—60 percent in Greater Minnesota and 40 percent in the Twin Cities.

A recent study by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern found that in 2023, the loss of local newspapers in America accelerated to an average of 2.5 per week, leaving more than 200 counties as news deserts.

New York Times opinion writer Thomas Friedman wrote recently that “small-town newspapers used to be a buffer to the worst of national politics in that a local newspaper is less likely to go too far to one extreme or another.” He went on to say that town papers nurture healthy interdependencies—keeping the schools decent, streets clean and sustaining local businesses.

Early newspapers relied on type being set by hand; this cabinet held a variety of lead types necessary for printing. Today, printed newspapers are laid out on computers and digitally sent to printers for printing – increasingly, media is distributed over the internet. (Image courtesy of Fillmore County Historical Society)

A 2025 survey commissioned by Press Forward Minnesota found that 43-percent of this state’s residents get their state and local news through social media. But the survey also found that 31 percent trust local news more than national news, especially if they know or are familiar with the reporters providing coverage.

It’s in this climate that Root River Current was created.

Print or digital—local is what matters

According to Minnesota’s Local News Ecosystem Report (2024), for every two local news outlets that closed in Minnesota since 2018, one new one launched. Root River Current is one of those startups.

While regional papers serving Southeast Minnesota such as the Fillmore County Journal, Winona Post, Rochester Post Bulletin and La Crosse Tribune provide broad coverage about local happenings, resources often limit their ability to focus as closely as they once did on the people who live in our area’s small towns.

Since it began publishing online in 2023, Root River Current has been working to fill this gap, guided by its motto: Building Community Through Storytelling. Its focus, then and now, is on telling untold or under-told stories about the people, culture and history of Southeast Minnesota.

No media outlet has the capacity to do it all, so we do what we can. For Root River Current that means publishing people-centered articles, essays, poetry, photography and other locally-focused stories—a feature that has increasingly gone missing with the disappearance of the bygone “town newspaper.”