OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVES

I was riding a dopamine high on a recent Friday.

We were in Brooklyn Park for the annual Minnesota Newspaper Association Convention. The night before, we took the Mills Trophy back to Owatonna for the second year in a row.

The Mills Trophy is a highly coveted award in the world of print newspapers. It is given to the best weekly newspaper in Minnesota each year.

Our publisher Rick and company were nice enough to drop me off in St. Paul just before 11 p.m.

My wife needed the car the next day for work, and being a one-car household, it meant getting dropped off at the hotel in Brooklyn Park for day two of the convention, around 7:30 a.m.

I had less than six hours of sleep but didn’t care. I was a collegiate athlete and have been competing my whole life. As in sports, I would be riding high from winning for a while.

Of course, the convention hadn’t opened for the day yet, and many of the journalists staying in the hotel were already in the lobby getting caught up on work.

I found a comfy seat. Then my mood changed.

Since late 2025, I’ve had the great honor of serving on the Minnesota Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists board.

My phone buzzed. It was a Slack message. Two reporters had been arrested.

Make no mistake about it: Minnesota journalist Georgia Fort and Don Lemmon were arrested for doing their jobs as journalists.

A press conference was set to take place in a couple of hours, so a statement needed to be put out, along with a statement for our President Elect to read.

In the meantime, I ran into multiple journalists at the convention, who when they found out I was on the SPJ Board, wanted to make sure we were standing up for our local journalists.

When any journalist, in any country around the world, is arrested for simply recording events as they happen, it’s terrifying.

For it to happen in the United States of America is a nightmare.

As a reporter, I have been in a number of volatile situations over the years.

I covered the 2016 Republican and Democratic Conventions, the Inauguration of Donald Trump, and the Women's March, all in the same year.

These were some of the biggest protests and political events in modern history. For several days during the conventions, as an example, my main assignment during the day was to literally cover protests all day. The bigger the better.

Sure, there was the risk of being swept up in some sort of mass detainment of crowds, due to whatever may have happened at any given protest, but there was absolutely no thought of being arrested weeks later for simply doing our jobs as reporters.

It should also be noted that the federal government wasn't able to convince judges that the two reporters, Minnesota journalist Georgia Fort and nationally recognized journalist Don Lemon, should be arrested. Instead, the Department of Justice was able to get indictments against them via a Grand Jury.

It would appear the United States government is using its full power to try to intimidate reporters. To silence a free press. To make our jobs even harder as reporters.

We see this all the time on a much smaller scale. I have never had a local government threaten to have me arrested, but I have been a thorn in the side of enough officials to have my bosses called into their offices plenty of times over the years.

But the journalism community stepped up last week.

By the time lunch rolled around at the convention, we had already sent our statement for SPJ.

During lunch, I saw there was an opportunity to sign onto a statement with a consortium of newsrooms and news organizations, like the Minnesota Newspaper Association.

I told Rick about it, and he immediately signed onto it for both the Steele County Times and our sister paper the Dodge County Independent.

The statement reads:

“The First Amendment recognizes the press as holding a distinct and protected role in our democracy. In America, we do not arrest journalists for doing their jobs. The Minnesota journalism community stands united in defense of press freedom and the essential role reporting plays in holding power to account, now more than ever.”

I am proud to work at a place that will stand up for a free press no matter what.