Local shops and newspapers are a two-way support system

By Robert Williams

Editor

As we flipped the calendar to 2024 here at the Frazee-Vergas Forum, we opened up another year of opportunities to be our backpage Business Showcase.

We use this monthly column to feature local and regional businesses, both big and small, to highlight their contributions to the community and accentuate what they do, how they operate and what makes them special. It’s one of many ways we support local businesses.

We’ve been lucky enough to feature larger companies from around the region like Arvig, BTD and Team Industries, as well as, smaller local businesses like: Frazee Family Foods, Solberg Insurance, United Community Insurance, Seip Drug, Lakes Corner Liquor, Frazee Care Center and The Backyard in Perham, the latter being a personal favorite as I basically get paid to play with dogs for an hour.

Companies have the option of creating their own marketing piece or being interviewed to help create one.

Contact our Advertising Sales Representative Monaya Lund (ads@frazeeforum.com) to get on the list and check our availability for your preferred month to highlight your business.

The Showcase is also important to us here at the newspaper, as we rely on advertising dollars and subscriptions from loyal readers. 

In discussing the issue with employees at other independent newspapers around the region, there has been a noticeable shift in advertising dollars spent with newspapers, where we see more consistent advertising from churches and non-profit organizations than businesses.

There are definitely a lot of options for business owners on where to spend their ad dollars and we certainly hope that local companies will invest in local, independent newspapers. It’s the only way to keep them around.

According to Northwestern Medill, a leading journalism school in the country, more than half of U.S. counties have no access or very limited access to local news.

The loss of local newspapers accelerated in 2023 to an average of 2.5 per week, leaving more than 200 counties as “news deserts” and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information, researchers at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University have found.

According to Axios Twin Cities, all 87 counties in Minnesota have at least one news outlet, but since 2005, the state has lost 34 percent of its newspapers—dropping from 369 in 2005 to a current number of 242.

Most recently, Warroad (May 2023) and Mayville, N.D. (Sept. 2023), lost their newspapers.

Between dropping circulation numbers that were adversely affected by both television and the internet in the 1980s and 90s, the web’s continual growth into the 2000s continued to take away money newspapers need to survive. 

Throw in the 2007-08 recession, a global pandemic a dozen years later, and the ongoing lack of coordination between internet media companies like Facebook and Google and newspapers, it all leads to the next legal battleground with artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT and others.

Personally, I want humanity to remain at the creation level of news in my local newspapers and for our work to be an enthusiastic support system for the school, local government and especially businesses in small towns, which we need to succeed desperately. 

Consider aiding in that quest by showing off what your business does best in any or all of our three newspapers.