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The obituary writers keep circling over Minnesota journalism like vultures at a roadkill buffet. Every month another weekly folds, another print schedule gets slashed, another newsroom trims its staff down to a skeleton crew. The funeral dirges are loud enough to make you believe the whole industry is finished.
It’s not. Not even close. The truth is simpler, sharper, and harder to swallow if you’re sitting in a newspaper boardroom still clinging to a legacy model: journalism isn’t dying, it’s shedding dead weight. The future belongs to personality columnists, the neighborhood voices who make readers laugh, growl, and nod along. The people who sound like they actually live in the community.
We already know this works because Minnesota set the standard. Sid Hartman built a career on being more personality than prose, walking into locker rooms like he owned them, turning offhand comments into gospel. Readers didn’t care if they agreed with him; they just wanted Sid. Patrick Reusse carries that torch with a grumble and a smirk, half-irritated, half-amused, always worth the read. Their columns weren’t “content.” They were connection. They were the conversation at the coffee shop before the boss showed up.
That’s what people are starving for now. A voice. A point of view. Somebody they can argue with and still come back for more.
I’ve lived this shift firsthand. For nearly 20 years, I published a free newsrack tabloid in Duluth. Twin Ports People was hyperlocal, community news with soft bite. But eventually the printing and delivery costs made no sense. Why pay for trucks and racks when I could hit “send” on a newsletter and publish by the hour? So I made the jump.
At first, people thought I was nuts. Who abandons a successful free community newspaper for email? Two decades later, I’m the one with thousands of subscribers opening my newsletter every morning, advertisers lining up for the eyeballs, and readers telling me they prefer the beep on their phone over flipping pages. The analytics don’t lie. Email open rates bury .com clicks. Readers want the story in their inbox or lock screen, not buried on some homepage they’ll never visit.
And here’s the kicker: I’m not alone. All over the country — and yes, right here in Minnesota — so-called “power bloggers” are proving this is the future model.
Look at Bring Me The News. They started out as a scrappy online-only operation, delivering Minnesota news in quick, personality-driven bursts. They built an audience by being nimble and fast, not by lugging around a printing press. Now they’re a statewide force online, showing what happens when you cut straight to where the readers are.
Take MinnPost. It leans nonprofit, sure, but it’s the personalities — columnists and reporters with real perspective — that keep its core audience hooked. Their email newsletters are sharp, opinionated, and targeted, not watered down. They prove that even “serious” journalism benefits from distinct voices rather than corporate blandness.
Even in the suburbs, smaller blogs and Substack newsletters are bubbling up. In Edina, Bloomington, Rochester, and Duluth, local writers are carving out followings with only a laptop, a phone camera, and the guts to say what their neighbors are thinking. These aren’t household names yet, but they’re building trust like Sid and Reusse did: by sounding like home.
Nationally, the list keeps growing. Block Club Chicago has tens of thousands of paying readers who want neighborhood coverage with personality. Mill Media in the UK has spun up city-focused newsletters in Manchester, Liverpool, and beyond, proving the model scales. Tangle has hundreds of thousands of subscribers by doing politics with clarity and voice. Judd Legum’s Popular Information punches out daily investigations with the tone of someone who knows his readers by name.
The common thread? None of them hide behind .com homepages and only a few have a paywall. None of them is obsessing about print circulation declines. They’re in the inbox, in the pocket, in the reader’s hand. They’re voices, not “content providers.”
That’s what publishers in Minnesota are missing when they throw all their chips into cutting print or redesigning their websites for the hundredth time. The future isn’t in the layout. It’s in the personality. It’s in having columnists embedded in every neighborhood, every small town, every city council chamber, every rink and gym. Readers don’t just want information — they want connection. They want someone they trust to chew on the news, spit it out with an opinion, and give them something to discuss over lunch.
Even print can come back if it’s built around personality. I’ll repeat it: the free newsrack tabloid can still work. Not as a profit center, but as a calling card. Put it in the diner, the coffee shop, the hardware store. Make it a weekly handshake that pulls people into the digital pipeline. But only if it’s stuffed with columns that sound like home. Nobody is picking up a wire story about Congress at the corner café. They’ll pick up the column about the local high school, the town levy, or the neighbor who just won a state title in cross-country skiing.
The obituary writers will keep circling because it’s easier to pronounce journalism dead than to admit it has to change. But the evidence is everywhere. Email-first, personality-driven, hyperlocal journalism is thriving wherever it’s tried. Readers will scream for more of it, and they’ll pay for it too.
The question is whether Minnesota publishers have the guts to move fast enough. The standard was set by Sid and Reusse: voice over volume, connection over content. It’s time to let the next generation of neighborhood columnists grab the mic.
Because the best days aren’t behind us. They’re ahead. And the only thing standing in the way is our refusal to believe it.
