Brute’s Bleat

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By Harold Brutlag

I envy Mike Muller who has enjoyed winters in Florida since he retired from the theatre business a number of year’s ago. He keeps me posted on his fishing trips which I enjoy and also on things happening in Minnesota and in particular Maple Lake.

His most recent concern was the numerous weekly newspapers that are being boarded up this weekend. He mentioned Hutchinson and Litchfield along with Chaska, Chanhassen, Jordan, and Kimball as some in this area. It seems as if some, or maybe all, of these newspapers were owned by an out-of-state conglomerate and once they had depleted the newspapers finances, they would pull the plug. It’s always been said corporations don’t have a conscious and when the going gets tough they simply walk away.

I’m sure the staffs at these newspapers had put their heart and soul into providing their communities with a newspaper they could be proud of. Everything changes and for the weeklies one of the early signs was when the big box stores opened and the weeklies found out their   town’s small businesses couldn’t compete and consequently lost that advertising revenue. One thing the Minnesota Newspaper Association urged back when I was a publisher, was for weeklies to charge for obituaries to help bring in some new revenue. I was bull-headed enough to think otherwise and consequently didn’t charge for them thinking it was a community service of the newspaper. Now it’s commonplace and just take at look the Tribune’s pages of obituaries which has helped that company’s revenue once the electronic media took over whatever advertising they could get their hands on including the pages of classified ads in the 60’s and 70’s and ever since.

 

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