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Ted Almen woke up with back spasms in the middle of the night Tuesday.
As terrible as the pain was, the deadline clock for his Kerkhoven Banner newspaper to go to press wasn't going to stop ticking.
"The last thing on my mind was to come down to the office and work, but I knew we had a press deadline so I came down here about 5:30 and finished up the paper as quickly as possible," said Almen, who co-publishes the weekly paper with his wife, Kari Jo.
The Almens are the only full-time staffers at their paper. About 16 miles to the west in Benson, the Anfinson family runs the Swift County-Monitor News. Another 25 miles further west is the Appleton Press run by the Ehrenberg family.
All three of the local, family-owned newspapers operate in a county with fewer than 10,000 residents, making Swift County's news density notable in a time when local sources aren't a given.
"It is unusual," Almen said. "In this industry a lot of newspapers have been gobbled up by corporate interests and made into a chain, and that hasn't happened here."
At 9,838 residents as of the 2020 census, Swift County's ratio of newspapers to residents stands out. The Minnesota Newspaper Association's directory lists counties with more papers, including Otter Tail County's seven and Polk County's five in Greater Minnesota. But nearly all counties with at least three newspapers have much higher populations and/or lower combined circulations than Swift County.
Reed Anfinson, co-publisher of the Benson paper with his wife, Shelly, sees a direct link between his county's news environment and local ownership.
"The reasons we have three community newspapers is because the Almens, Johnson/Ehrenbergs (the family behind the Appleton Press), and Anfinson families put in the hours and the time and accept the struggles rather than walking away," he said. "We help each other out."
Close as they are in proximity, these papers are competitors only in the sense of being independently owned.
For modest quarterly compensation, Anfinson sends his reports on the local county board to his county compatriots. The Banner and Appleton Press respond in kind, sharing stories of interest to readers outside their communities. Almen noted that the Banner recently shared an article by local writer Mike Haglund about his connection to Wally "The Beer Man" McNeil, a well-known vendor at the Metrodome.
Mostly, the papers cover their respective communities. Readers get hard news from city council and school board meetings, features on local people and groups, and photo galleries from the county fair.
A newspaper needs to know its community to be successful, Anfinson said. He wrote about the importance of this in a recent column, criticizing large chains with only nominal and financial interests in the communities that they serve. He also co-owns the Grant County Herald in Elbow Lake and the Stevens County Times in Morris.
"Without local ownership there's no dedication to community," he said. "These owners could walk down the street and walk by their staff going out to lunch and not recognize them."
As Almen's painful wake up suggests, publishing a newspaper isn't for the faint of heart. Budgets are tight. Staffing is short. Free time is limited.
Almen's family has run the Banner since the 1950s -- he also co-publishes the Clara City Herald and The Lakes Area Review of New London and Spicer. At age 67, he wonders if he'll be the last captain on the ship.
"I'm very worried about if anyone would be interested in carrying on after us," he said. "The economics of it aren't great. We do fine; we're OK, but if we were just starting out it'd be different."
Anfinson, 71, shares similar concerns.
"Who takes over for Ted? Who takes over for me? Who takes over for April (Ehrenburg, editor of the Appleton Press) and Leslie in Appleton?" he asked. "That's the toughest part we face."
Succession plans are on the mind of Minnesota Newspaper Association members, said Lisa Hills, the organization's executive director.
"We've had some discussion on if there's a way that we could intervene before a newspaper closes," she said. "We'd like the opportunity to do that. It's a difficult position because we often don't know when a newspaper is going to close."
Newspapers are part of a community financial ecosystem, the success of which often depends on how other organizations are doing. In that way, Hills said, newspapers can rise and fall with their surroundings.
"Overall newspapers are a reflection of their community, and if there's a healthy community, you'll see a strong newspaper," she said.
Despite the narrative of expanding news deserts, Hills feels Minnesota is holding on strong even as more support is needed. She noted all but one county in Minnesota, Scott County, has a newspaper in the association's directory. Wilkin County is worth noting because it is served by the North Dakota-based Wahpeton Daily News.
In other words, every county in the state apart from Scott County and Wilkin County has a paper within it. Hennepin County, by far the most populous in the state, has 19. Traverse County, the least populous, has one.
Compared with other states, Minnesota ranks 10th in per-capita news outlets with 4.62 per 100,000 residents, according to Northwestern University's Local News Initiative.
The vast majority of papers in Minnesota are online as well as in print, Hills said. Another way Swift County stands out is in how, at least in Kerkhoven and Benson, its papers largely eschew digital news.
At the Banner, which has no website and sparingly posts content on Facebook, the decision comes down to priorities. "I'm steadfastly against having another thing to do," Almen said.
He has enough on his plate already. Going online wouldn't be worth the time it would take to do it well, he said.
If readers want a digital version of the paper, he's sent them PDFs of the pages via email. Like him, his subscribers generally prefer print.
"I like to hold it in my hands, do the crossword puzzles, set it down, pick it back up," he said.
Anfinson does much the same time-cost calculation when setting his paper's website aside, for now. With more people around it could work, he said, but it's not near the top of his to-dos.
"We need to improve that presence, and we're going to, but when it generates a few dollars per month in income it's not a high priority," he said.
More advertising in any form, the "gas that fuels the engine of a newspaper," remains the priority to keep papers like Kerkhoven's in business, Almen said.
Just as newspaper consolidation is happening, the same is happening in other sectors, drying up advertising dollars with it. In response, Anfinson thinks newspapers should be aggressive in calling for public funds, or citizen funding, as he calls it.
He sees farm organizations and other interest groups lobbying for public funding every year and thinks journalists should take a page from their playbook. To some in his industry, relying on government funding is anathema to independent journalism.
From his experience, though, newspapers have more to fear from subscribers and business advertisers than they do from government entities. With guard rails, he's confident it could work. Citizen funding ultimately makes sense to him considering citizens lose out on local news sources when newspapers die.
"The biggest challenge to start with is to convince the general public and legislators that the internet is not going to provide them with the information they need to be informed as citizens," he said. "People will say they're informed on social media. I'll say what news? Is it the school board? Is it local? It's not. It's national, and statewide in some sense."
Challenges of the industry aside, Anfinson and Almen don't see themselves doing anything else. They both spoke about how much it matters to them to provide their services to their communities, seeing it as a bulwark against the unreliable and less local information that people consume on social media.
"I love what I do and I've been doing it for a long time," Almen said. "I'm not the best at it; I'm not the worst at it. But it's something to get me out of bed in the morning and get downtown."