HOT PURSUIT

There’s a phrase in the journalism world that best describes what we’re all about at the Steele County Times. As the phrase goes, “We’re hyper-local news.”

And that’s a good thing for you. We’re able to provide a niche that can be very difficult to find anywhere else.

Journalism has certainly evolved over the years and seen its fair share of challenges. Sometimes as a publisher it’s not easy to navigate through those rocky storms.

What I have learned over the past few years is that people crave local community news. Among other things, it’s one way for them to stay connected to the community that they call home.

We take great pride in deploying our news staff of seven with 225 years of combined experience to cover Steele County. Our reporters are out in your community, talking to your leaders, your teachers, your businesspeople, your neighbors, your elected officials and the list goes on. We sit through school board meetings, city council meetings, county board meetings to learn what’s happening in your neighborhood.

Our coverage encompasses the successes and failures, the triumphs and tragedies of what happens around us. We are there to cover the things that actually impact your day-to-day lives.

It saddens me to think there are communities who don’t have what we’ve been fortunate to offer our readers. Over the past month, eight newspapers have shuttered in Minnesota, including one in my home area. I ran into a woman last weekend who works for one of the cities impacted by the shutdowns. Besides being concerned about not having a newspaper to call their own, she was also frantic because they have no newspaper to publish the city’s legal notices.

Only you can help keep journalism alive. It comes through subscribing to the newspaper or purchasing advertising. I know we all like a hard bargain or getting something for nothing. But we have our newspaper moderately priced for the content you’re getting. Take this week, for example. Our paper contains 40 pages of content, all of which is local. Even with that many pages, I still ended up holding 10 staff-written stories.

I love hearing the stories from readers who share that it often takes them an entire week or at least several hours over a few days to read everything in the paper. And I can’t tell you how many read the paper from cover-to-cover. Our paper isn’t like some that many have told us take only minutes to read.

I encourage you to check out our specials for new subscribers (and there’s also one for people who would like to renew). To drive home the importance of local, we’ve team up with the Steele County American Dairy Association this week. For new subscribers, you could even end up with two free malt tickets to the ADA’s Malt Stand coming to special events this summer. Share with your friends, neighbors and other family members how it’s time for them to subscribe to take advantage of the “hyper-local news” we offer.

I hope you’ll agree being hyper-local is going to keep us in hot pursuit of providing the community what it expects from its local media.