The Warroad Pioneer, a pillar of its small Minnesota town, ended its 121-year run with bloody marys, bold type and gloom about the void it would leave behind.
Whenever she thought her small staff would be facing a particularly stressful deadline day, Rebecca Colden, the publisher of the weekly Warroad Pioneer, declared a Bloody Mary Monday.
This was definitely one of those Mondays — indeed, the last of them. The Pioneer, the newspaper that had served this tiny town just below the Canadian border for 121 years, was one issue away from certain death.
When Colden woke up that day, she listened to a contemporary Christian song that had buoyed her spirit of late: "This is my story, this is my song/Praising my savior all day long." Now she was trudging into the newsroom on a cold May morning with vodka, olives and tomato mix. A mock-up of the front page greeted her on the newsroom printer, screaming out a bold, striking headline: FINAL EDITION. She sat at a desk and opened some bills, one of them stamped "past due."
With the distribution of its final issue on May 7, The Warroad Pioneer, which printed about 1,100 copies per week, joined roughly 2,000 newspapers that have closed in the United States over the last 15 years, according to a study by University of North Carolina researchers soberly titled "The Expanding News Desert." Today in many US communities, the researchers noted, "there is simply not enough digital or print revenue to pay for the public service journalism that local newspapers have historically provided."
In Warroad, The Pioneer was full of soft-focus features on residents, reprinted news releases, photos of fishermen with their outsize catches, and news of awards won by children and Shriners. There were the occasional stories, too, about city officials, the school board and local sports.
This, then, was what the desert might look like: No hometown paper to print the obituaries from the Helgeson Funeral Home. No place to chronicle the exploits of the beloved high school hockey teams. No historical record for the little town museum, which had carefully kept the newspaper in boxes going back to 1897.
And what about the next government scandal, the next school funding crisis? Who would be there? Who would tell?
"Is there going to be somebody to hold their feet to the fire?" asked Tim Bjerk, 51, an in-house photographer at Marvin, the big window and door manufacturer that dominates the town.
Others imagined the news moving from person to person, unedited and unchecked, on Facebook or other social media networks. "A lot of it is going to be word-of-mouth through kaffee klatsches," said Todd Miller, 57, a former member of the county commission. "And who knows what variant of BS gets passed around there."
The American news desert advanced, though after a few weeks, a new paper, The Warroad Advocate, would spring up, distributed free to anyone with a post office box. The publishers called it a 13-week trial, contingent on community and advertiser support, and so it was not clear whether it would continue beyond its experimental run.
At The Warroad Pioneer, it had been a death by familiar cuts. Hardly anyone took out a classified ad anymore. Amazon, with its doorstep retail service, has felt particularly miraculous in this remote stretch of Minnesota, where winter temperatures can dip to -37C. Storefront retail has suffered. Doug's Supermarket, the only grocer in town, preferred to put its colour shopping inserts inside a fat, free, ads-only mailer called The Northland Trading Post.
"I don't want to feel like I'm letting the community down, but I also know I'm a small business, and it's dollars and cents," said Colden, who added that her paper was far from turning a profit. "I'm broken with the decision. I'm just broken with it."
Colden had announced the paper's demise — one of about 65 to close in Minnesota since 2004 — in a letter to community leaders a few weeks earlier. Warroad's "dire retail reconfiguration and exodus," she wrote, "has had a catastrophic impact on this community newspaper."
She was surprised when people were surprised. She thought they had recognised the cry for help that was the March 14, 2017, issue. A front-page bar below The Pioneer's flag was always reserved for a quotation of the week, usually from the likes of a Billy Graham or John F. Kennedy. But this time it was from Tupac Shakur: "I'm a reflection of the community."
Below was a sea of white space, where the articles usually were, and a message floating in the middle: "Without YOU, There is NO Newspaper!"
But what could be done? Mike Kvarnlov ran the local General Motors dealership for years before recently selling it to his son. He thought it was a tragedy that the paper would be folding. But the new world was what it was.
"Fifteen years ago, we were 50 per cent paper and 50 per cent radio," he said of the dealership's advertising budget. But now, most of the money went to the internet, with print and radio only in the mix to reach older people. And each year, he said, online advertising "gets a larger percentage as the old people are going away."
The trouble with truth telling
It was sometime after 9am when Colden's remaining staff — Koren Zaiser, 48, the editor, and Jenée Provance, 56, the page designer — rolled into the Pioneer newsroom. Shelley Galle, the longtime office manager, had already taken a job at the Seven Clans Casino across the river.
Provance mixed the bloody marys. The women hoisted their plastic cups. "We're going to get this done," Colden told them. "We're going to get it out, and we're going to do it well."
Outside there was no grand rally to save The Pioneer. It was mostly another day in Warroad, population 1,880. Farmers gossiped over breakfast at the Daisy Gardens restaurant. Workers trudged by the hundreds to their jobs at the big, yellow Marvin window factory.
Part of the problem, Colden suspected, was that no one could imagine Warroad without the paper that had been publishing since the McKinley administration. "There's that complacency," she said. "With a 120-year-old paper, they are just so sure we're always going to be there."
There was also the reality that truth telling in a tiny town, while generating good copy, does not always generate love for the newspaper. On that Monday morning, Zaiser, the editor, took her drink to her computer and formatted the Court Report, The Pioneer's unflinching weekly roll call of anyone who had recently run afoul of the law. For this final edition, a 29-year-old man had pleaded guilty to theft; a 30-year-old man had pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of pornographic work involving minors; a 28-year-old man had pleaded guilty to driving an all-terrain vehicle on a road.
Everyone read the Court Report. Some weeks it seemed like the sole flinty standout in a paper full of trophy hoisters and plaque clutchers, fishing advice and garden tips. Colden hawked the space around it as the best advertising real estate in the paper. Over the years people had tried to bribe their way out of the Court Report, Colden said, to no avail.
If you messed up, you were going in.
In fact, Colden herself had made the Court Report for speeding. Provance had been in it for driving with expired tags. Zaiser landed in it in October 2014 for driving while drunk.
It was the truth at its most raw, and Colden believed it served an essential small-town function: "Accountability," she said. Zaiser wrote a confessional column the week she appeared in the Court Report, acknowledging that her drunken driving could have killed somebody. The experience, she said, set her on a path to a renewed Christian faith.
"It's one of those things that shows us that all of us are fallible," said Wayne Maxwell of Woodland Bible Church, Colden's preacher, who had been counselling her through the paper's demise. "That nobody is above anybody else."
But there were also instances in which Colden and Zaiser believed that printing too much of the truth might be dangerous enough to unwind Warroad's social fabric. There were only so many people in Warroad the paper could afford to offend.
In early April, they learned of the case against Joshua Demmerly, a hometown boy who became a Warroad police officer. In court documents, the authorities accused Demmerly, 29, of stalking, kidnapping and sexually assaulting a Warroad teenager. Detailed descriptions of the allegations were divulged in other, bigger Minnesota news outlets. And though The Pioneer ran the article on its front page, it was mostly just a bare-bones list of the charges.
It was a self-inflicted patch of news desert, but Zaiser defended the decision. "If you want the graphic details of what happened, you can read it in The Grand Forks Herald," she said, referring to the paper in the larger North Dakota city a few hours' drive away. "Especially because I know the victim. He's a friend of my son's. And it's awful."
"Taking a whip" around town
Warroad residents call a quick, social drive around the heart of town "taking a whip." On a whip one sees train tracks, pickup trucks, and signs and stickers declaring "Hockeytown USA," a nod to Warroad's production of an outsize number of famous hockey players.
It is a city without traffic jams; indeed, it is one that could use a few more people. (A glossy visitors' guide ends with a pitch: "If you enjoy spending time in our area, why not make it your new home?") And it is a city defined by the big buildings owned by the Marvin company — offices, factory space, a big hardware store and a 6,000-square-foot visitors' center. Inside is a museum-quality exhibit on the company's long local history, and profiles of the Marvin family members who serve as Warroad's de facto royal family.
Colden tends to take her whip in her Chevrolet SUV with the yearning strum and thump of praise music on the stereo. She is 59, politically conservative, with a slight resemblance to Hillary Clinton and a voice that shares some of Clinton's no-nonsense, Middle American timbre.
She bought The Warroad Pioneer in December 2008, with a background in marketing, confidence in her writing ability and big hopes of turning around an iconic local brand that she thought was foundering editorially.
She discovered her inner assignment editor, incessantly scouring the town for story ideas as she took her whips past manicured tiny houses and tired clutches of downtown storefronts.
But she also found herself swimming, almost immediately, against the current of the Great Recession. She introduced a website for The Pioneer. It did little for her bottom line. A divorce, a bankruptcy and a failed bait-shop venture with her then-husband did not help.
The paper had never had more than four full-time employees during her tenure, and had always relied on a network of freelancers for much of its coverage. More than a year ago, Colden was forced to lay off her sole freelance local government reporter. The desert was already creeping, and people felt it.
"Definitely, it got slim," said Bill Boyd, 55, a Marvin employee. "Even the ads — if you wanted to get a snowblower, you used to look at the paper. Now all of that's on Facebook."
Holding out for a miracle
On the Wednesday before the final edition, Colden returned to the newsroom from a meeting with a Warroad entrepreneur whose business acumen she valued. She had hoped it would generate some ideas that might save the paper.
It had been held at Warroad's small-business incubator, the Discovery and Development Hub, a collaborative project between the Marvin company and local government. The DD Hub, as it calls itself, is a downtown standout — a vision of the best-case future Warroad imagines for itself, with contemporary furniture and hip sans-serif fonts on the window.
But when she returned, her staff knew from looking at her that the meeting had not fixed anything. "We read each other's minds," Zaiser said.
Tall and expressive with a small nose stud, Zaiser had worked at the window factory before Colden hired her 10 years ago. She had wanted something different out of life, and she had a way with words and grammar. But she did not like asking tough questions of government officials. Her strength was writing features about veterans, Girl Scouts and families fighting cancer.
Provance, the graphic designer, sat one cubicle over. Her passion was directing summer theater — The Pioneer had profiled her — and she attended Bible study with her co-workers each Tuesday after the paper went online.
She was holding out hope for a miracle for The Pioneer. But she was also bitter. She had heard that the City Council had already voted to begin placing the Warroad legal ads in The Roseau Times-Region, the paper for the rival town 20 miles to the west.
The Times-Region's publisher, Jodi Wojciechowski, was considering including more Warroad news now.
Provance doubted it. She huffed. "But it will be around forever," she said, "because there's community buy-in. People advertise."
Colden was in her office, the door half-closed. Her eyes were glistening. "I think a lot of times people want that Hallmark story where a knight in shining armour comes out and we're going to save the day," she said. "That was not this conversation."
Her staff saw the toughness in her in April 2010 when she was forced to tangle with John W. Marvin, known as Jake, the chief executive of the Marvin company at the time. The paper had published an article about Marvin's daughter, Brooke Marvin, above the fold, along with her mug shot. The story described a chaotic scene at a trailer park and reported that Brooke Marvin had been arrested on charges of misdemeanor domestic assault, obstructing arrest and criminal damage to property.
It was a bold move. John Marvin's brother, Bob Marvin, has been Warroad's mayor since 1995. During the recession, the company earned the gratitude of the community by refusing to lay off workers, instead cutting hours and pay — a strategy that also earned repeated praise from President Barack Obama.
Colden said she heard from Jake Marvin soon after the article came out. He was angry. "Your name's no different than anybody else's name," she recalls telling him, "and we publish other people's children who get in trouble the same way."
Marvin told her he might rescind Marvin advertising — though he later walked back the threat. But he also rescinded a favor. From that point forward, The Pioneer was no longer driven to Warroad from its printer in Grafton, North Dakota, on a Marvin company truck.
The next week, Colden wrote an editorial defending the article. "To anyone wanting to control the freedom of the press," she wrote in a memorably tart final paragraph, or to those that "feel they can do a better job for the community, the Warroad Pioneer may be purchased for $500,000."
(Marvin, in an interview, verified the details of Colden's account, and added that he had canceled his subscription for good measure. Colden said she did not think the Marvin family was responsible for the demise of The Pioneer.)
The newspaper went on to thoroughly cover two of the more important local stories of the last decade. The first was a budget crisis in the school district that forced teacher layoffs and the consolidation of all grades into a single building.
The Pioneer followed the crisis closely. It used public records laws to request emails sent by school board members, revealing depths of infighting and dysfunction, and pointed to a possible violation of open-meeting laws.
In another instance, the paper followed a scandal at the county commission, where a board member had been accused of improperly benefiting from a county gravel contract. The commissioner, Roger Falk, was found innocent of a criminal charge in 2017. Colden described the affair as "ludicrous," and an "example of backwoods politics and finger-pointing."
"We deserve better"
Colden's rule for Bloody Mary Monday is that the vodka stops flowing at noon. In the late afternoon, there were familiar headaches to deal with: The father of Scott Johnson, the Pioneer's landlord, had died, and the obituary had just come over. Colden asked Provance to bump up the issue to 18 pages from 16. Provance grumbled.
Zaiser was on the phone desperately hunting for a student who could tell her the names of two unidentified high school baseball players in a photo.
Sometime after 5:30pm, they shipped the files of the newspaper's pages to the printer. The final issue included an article about the future of the farmers' oil co-op now that its general manager had resigned. There was an article about low-interest federal loans for farmers affected by natural disasters. There was an ad inviting readers to the 85th Birthday Open House in honor of a woman named Ione Carlson. And the Warroad High School prom king and prom queen were on the front page, just below the fold.
The Pioneer sisterhood opened a few bottles of wine.
The next day, Colden dropped her last-ever stack of Pioneers at the Thrifty White Pharmacy on Lake Street, and in the afternoon she and her staff met for Bible study.
Zaiser read from the Book of John: "Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again, and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy. In that day you will no longer ask me anything."
Provance said she was still angry. "I'm very ashamed of this community, and we deserve better."
Colden told her to let the resentment go. But she was having trouble letting go herself, she said, as she drove in the warming weather and saw the farmers in their fields: "I thought, 'We need to get those farm stories going.'"
Written by: Richard Fausset
Photographs by: Tim Gruber
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES