The Eden Prairie/Woodbury connection

Kathy Saltzman had braved 32 miles of mid-October rush hour traffic between her Woodbury home in Washington County and Eden Prairie city hall.

She would take mental notes during the annual public meeting of Eden Prairie Local News (EPLN).

“As in many things,” the former state senator told this reporter, “you realize what you have lost and what you should have valued after it’s gone.” Woodbury’s community weekly stopped publishing on May 6, 2020, just six days after the adored Eden Prairie News had mailed its last issue to subscribers.

Saltzman and a festive assemblage of EP notables heard Publisher/CEO Steve Schewe report on the progress and challenges of the nonprofit online newspaper. The engaging, retired business consultant experienced with startups, glowed with enthusiasm. EPLN had just begun its fourth year of publication. A core group of reporters, editors and more than 25 freelancers have produced nearly 2,200 stories since its first headline in 2020.

Stories were typed on homebound keyboards during and through the ebb of the pandemic. They were formatted with photos and edited on a sophisticated but standard online tool named WordPress. EPLN mostly operated, and still does, on mission-driven sweat equity, volunteers, small stipends, and modest part-time salaries.

A governing board of community leaders, along with the publisher/CEO, a savvy media tech director, and seasoned journalists, helped prevent a local news desert following the closure of the Eden Prairie News. The consolidated Sun Sailor and larger regional news outlets like the StarTribune lacked the resources to fully cover a suburb with 64,000 residents and 57,000 jobs, not to mention the other 181 communities in the metro region.

“It’s a heavy lift to have created a new newspaper,” stated Saltzman after the meeting. “I think the online version is really intriguing.” The retired senator, now a public affairs consultant, is part of a Woodbury group hoping to fill the gap left by the departed Bulletin.

Seventy percent of the operating revenues of the Bulletin of Woodbury and Cottage Grove had come from advertising. But similar business models, which had pumped green into the press rooms and profits of dailies and weeklies from the 1980s into the new century, were slow to deal with the nation’s infatuation with the Internet and online advertising.

Saltzman and the gathering of EP boosters had heard Schewe and Board Chair Nancy Tyra-Lukens share EPLN’s aspirations, challenges and concerns. Would their news toddler mature into a sustainable community voice in a world trending with social media, billions of video shorts and travel selfies, Google ads, cute puppy photos and caustic politics?

The environment is not encouraging. Nearly 2,900 newspapers in the U.S. have died since 2005. A recent Northwestern University study reports 130 newspaper closings or mergers just last year. That’s more than two per week.

Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist and video producer Ken Stone provided a slide-enhanced primer on a controversial trend: artificial intelligence. AI tools like ChatGPT and image/photo generating apps promise to help the business side of news organizations but pose serious ethical and job security issues for reporters, photojournalists, and editors. The effective management of AI algorithms in newsrooms remains to be seen.

Stone, like Saltzman, lives in Woodbury. Their town counts 78,000 residents, but Woodbury’s chief source of news about itself is the Pioneer Press.

Alden Global Capital, a New York-based investment firm commonly perceived as a hedge fund, has held a financial interest in Minnesota’s oldest newspaper for 17 years. In November, reporter Jay Boller wrote in Racket (a sassy website created by former City Pages editors) that during Alden’s tenure, the Pioneer Press has shrunk from 202 Newspaper Guild members to 29 in 2023. Boller notes that the once vigorous daily no longer has even a single dedicated business reporter.

MediaNews Group, an Alden subsidiary, owns about 67 dailies and hundreds of community weeklies. After buying the eight Southwest News Media papers in January 2020, it shut down Eden Prairie News and Lake Shore Weekly News three months later.

Saltzman and other Woodbury residents, including educator and youth improv coach Amy Stedman, had reached out to several EPLN insiders to hear its story. They were invited to attend the EPLN annual public meeting.

The favor was returned. Schewe, along with board members Carol Bomben and this writer, attended the first in-person gathering of the Woodbury exploratory group by invitation. Sixteen residents, along with the Eden Prairie trio, showed up for the Nov. 27 conversation at Woodbury City Hall. Schewe was the key speaker.

His presentation noted that EPLN’s startup committee boasted former state lawmakers, city council members, an attorney, a tech professional, veteran journalists, a retired Lutheran pastor, respected finance and economic development officials, and citizen advocates.

A PowerPoint program, crafted and narrated by EPLN tech director Ben Hymans, brimmed with business, organizational, bookkeeping, and data advisories gleaned from the Eden Prairie experience and referenced the Institute of Nonprofit News (INN), LION Publishers, and nonprofit news operations in Michigan, New England, and Minneapolis.

During a Q&A discussion about how local is local, Schewe noted a courtesy provided by regional nonprofits Minnesota Reformer, Sahan Journal, and MinnPost. With permission, EPLN co-editors Stuart Sudak and Joanna Takes can republish, without charge, articles when EPLN, in Schewe’s words, “is trying to connect the dots with what happens hyper-locally in Eden Prairie with what is happening in the rest of the state and the region.”

The questions continued even after adjournment. A group, including Woodbury Mayor Anne Burt, Susan Kent, Kathy Saltzman, and the EPLN trio, gathered for an additional discussion that lasted about 20 minutes.

______ Our day in Woodbury had actually begun with lunch at a nearby Yum Restaurant with Saltzman and Kent, also a retired state senator. Over a table of plenty, with sandwiches and soup, we had a kind of rehearsal about what would be said during the main show at city hall. _______

During a follow-up Zoom “debriefing” the next day, the group identified several takeaways from the Schewe-Bomben-Strate meeting. There were “Aha” moments, noted Saltzman by phone. The tasks of starting from scratch are complex. She senses that the group favors a community-based, nonprofit, nonpartisan online news service, similar to Eden Prairie Local News.

But that may change. The group wants to first quietly focus on outreach and develop exploratory phase goals and a governance process before formally launching an initiative.

“The consensus of the group,” said Saltzman, “is that we want to be very thoughtful about this. We want to be sure that we do it right.”

The venture will be shaped by the Woodbury community itself.

The American Journalism Project’s Sarabeth Berman recently wrote about the state of journalism in 2023: “Despite what you may have heard, local news isn’t dying; it’s being reborn.”

Evidence of this may have happened on Dec. 5. That’s when Saltzman and Kent spoke with Jonathan Kealing, the Minneapolis-based chief network officer for the Institute of Nonprofit News. INN is a national organization of more than 420 nonprofit newspapers. INN assists startups.

Editor’s note: Ken Stone, mentioned in this story, and writer Jeff Strate serve on EPLN’s Journalism Standards and Ethics Committee. Jeff is also a founding EPLN Board member.

• The State of Local News Project — 2023 website.

• The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) website.

• “A Vampiric Hedge Fund Is Eating the Pioneer Press Alive,” by Jay Boller, Racket, Nov. 15, 2023 article.

• Readers wishing to contact the Woodbury news exploratory group can email jeff.strate@eplocalnews.org.