Little farms were bought up by more successful farmers. The hard part is speaking truth to your community. “The easy part is speaking truth to power. With declining circulation and ads, he estimates his three little local newspapers are worth at least $1 million less than a decade ago. Still, there are times when it’s exhausting. He’s proud that his reporting means something here, whether it’s a high-school student getting an award or an expensive building project the community rejected after he wrote about it. “I thought I’d come back here just for a little while,” he said. But he found those plans upended when his father’s health began declining in the late 1970s. His father came home from World War II, became a reporter at the Monitor-News and eventually bought the newspaper with a partner.Īnfinson grew up planning on a journalism career somewhere beyond small-town Minnesota. His grandfather, a poetry-loving plumber and child of Norwegian immigrants, came to Benson as a child. Still, Anfinson sometimes is surprised to find himself in Benson.įamily is a powerful force here, and this town is knitted together in ways that few Americans understand anymore. Inside the printing presses of Quinco Press, The Swift County Monitor-News goes to print on its weekly newspaper edition in Lowry, Minn., Tuesday, Nov. A contemplative man who casually quotes Voltaire, he loves newspapers deeply, and mourns the hundreds of small-town papers that have gone under in recent years. Wednesday afternoons, after he gets that week’s edition ready for printing the next morning, often count as his weekend.Īnfinson is 67 but looks at least a decade younger. His white Jeep is often spattered with mud from the county’s dirt roads. He’s there for school concerts, community fund-raisers, elections and livestock judging at the county fair. But just to follow local politics.Īnfinson does cover Swift County intensely - the city council, the county commissioners, the school board and nearly every other gathering of consequence. He grudgingly subscribes to the Monitor-News, which has a circulation of roughly 2,000. “Trash gets thrown at you so many times and eventually you just give up.” Anfinson’s editorials on farm subsidies and politics leave him fuming. “I just can’t stomach it anymore,” said Saunders, whose family settled on part of his sprawling farm more than a century ago, and who speaks almost lovingly about the rich brown soil. “In rural Minnesota we still have a work ethic, and I’ll call them Christian values, and that’s not reflected in our local newspaper,” said Al Saunders, a farmer and friend of Wolter’s who graduated from Benson High School a couple years after Anfinson.
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