Here is a very interesting "inside look" at the history, growth, technology change of small-town newspapering over the 35 years of this man's career in some small suburbs of the Twin Cities in Minnesota (including the papers on which Ruth Anne Maddox worked). Note some of the changes that occurred through the years, particularly in the way newspapers do business in a community, reasons for growth, technology changes, his predictions for the future of newspapers, and more.
Reporter, editor, witness to suburbs' growth is retiring
By Mark Weber
The president of Southwest Newspapers has announced his retirement from the company he organized and led for the past 35 years. Stan Rolfsrud, 61, combined the operations of five community newspapers in Chaska, Shakopee, Eden Prairie, Jordan and Prior Lake in the 1970s and operated them as a group. The organization also started the Chanhassen Villager and the Savage Pacer.
Southwest Newspapers, with headquarters in Shakopee, is a division of Red Wing Publishing Inc. and circulates nearly 80,000 papers weekly as well as maintaining eight newspaper Web sites and nearly a dozen specialty Web sites.
Rolfsrud credits an extraordinary population surge in the region and an explosion of information technology as critical to the expansion and success of the company. “These factors allowed me to enjoy an entire career in the same organization,” he said. “I’m grateful. It’s unusual these days to be able to do that.”
During his 35 years, Rolfsrud saw:
* the industry transform from Gutenberg-style letter press printing, using melted lead, to instant publishing world-wide on the Internet.
* the population and housing count of the Southwest Newspapers coverage area expand at a phenomenal rate, with its counties listed among the fastest growing in the country.
* little change in appetites for local news about community events and desires to connect to the neighborhood. Though tools and venues have changed, goals for editors, reporters and sales associates haven’t. Some Southwest employees have spent entire careers with Rolfsrud, and continue to practice basic community journalism.
In 1970, after earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Minnesota, Rolfsrud was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He spent his 19-month military career at Fort Hood, Texas, becoming the sergeant in charge of the 13th Support Brigade news office.
Discharged in 1972, he borrowed a car from a brother and took the only work he could find: news editor of the upstart Carver County Sun in Chaska at $115 a week. The city boasted one stop light and an experiment called Jonathan, a “new town” development that threatened to fracture a traditional community built on brick manufacturing and the processing of beet sugar and pickles.
Nine months later a rival publisher, the late Bill McGarry, sat in Pete ‘n Barb’s hamburger joint and offered Rolfsrud a job at his Chaska Weekly Valley Herald, promising to match his Sun salary. Rolfsrud held out for $175, but it was no bargain. When he reported to the 100-year-old office building on Second Street, he had no desk or telephone.
A gleaming new photo-typesetting computer, the size of a refrigerator, stood amidst the chaos of obsolete letterpress hardware, grinding yards of yellow punch tape into columns of justified news type.
It was to be only the first of many radical changes to the newspaper business that he would witness in his 35-year career.
Not only serving as the news editor of the Herald, Rolfsrud was then the only full-time news person, working as reporter, photographer and paste-up artist. He covered city halls and the school board, banging out news stories on a manual typewriter, waxing strips of type onto layout sheets late into the night, and driving the pasteups to the printer in Young America. It was hectic and high-energy.
“Nearby, Chanhassen was busy planning its future and I covered it,” he recalled. “Every Monday night, after five hours of give and take, some of the city council and staff would adjourn to Pauly’s Bar. After last call, we’d all cross the street to the Chalet Pizza and, in the only example of civic corruption I’ve ever personally witnessed, City Engineer Bill Schoell, whose private firm held a city contract, would treat us to the super house special combination pizza with everything, including extra onions and peppers.
“I would cover the Carver County Board the following morning, often with a serious case of indigestion.”
When Shakopee’s Howard Wigfield discovered that vodka cost more after distillers converted traditional fifths to new liter bottles, Rolfsrud dashed off a humorous column. It was picked up nationally and later published in a college textbook for journalists. His shortest column ever, “Stan Rolfsrud has nothing to say,” went world-wide. A year later, Chaska postmaster Lou Grindy was startled to see it reprinted in The Reader’s Digest. “If you Google my name today,” Rolfsrud laughs, “that column shows up.
“We had a lot of fun in the ’70s,” he recalls. “During the streaking craze, we got an ‘exclusive’ shot of the ‘Chaska Streaker’ dashing across Chestnut in long johns; when prostitution was linked to saunas in Twin Cities media, we investigated a Chaska barber who kept a sauna bath. We found scattered hair clippings.”
In 1978, Rolfsrud, McGarry, Bob Suel and two others each put $1,000 in a pot and launched the Glencoe Advertiser. Rolfsrud moved briefly to Glencoe to get it started. But he was single then, and chafed at living so far from the action. He soon sold his share to McGarry, trading for more interest in Southwest. The Glencoe newspaper continues today.
Rolfsrud met his future wife at a Chaska Chamber of Commerce meeting held, ironically, in a restaurant called “First Base.” Kathleen Blethen was co-owner of a paint store, Ann Marne Decorating. A loyal Democrat, she urged him to accept a press party invitation to Hubert H. Humphrey’s home in Waverly, when the vice president was campaigning for a return to the U.S. Senate in 1976. Rolfsrud agreed and soon the couple was in the backyard, eating campaign chicken and talking about needlepoint with Muriel and Hubert.
“Kathleen was extremely impressed and it was a very cheap date,” Rolfsrud recalls. A keepsake photo of the afternoon, with the ladies in full-length bicentennial regalia, was taken with Rolfsrud’s news camera by campaign aide Al Hofstede, former mayor of Minneapolis.
In 1980 the couple married in Chanhassen’s Lake Ann Park, with Kathleen’s three daughters as witnesses.
One day Rolfsrud and the business manager went to see banker Red DuToit and borrow $12,000 from the Carver County Bank to order the next generation of phototypesetters. “It was risky,” Rolfsrud recalls. “I remember Bill looking a little pale when we got back and told him how much we had borrowed. But he wanted to move forward, too.”
Those bulky machines worked hard for years, producing thousands of newspaper pages, outside job work and even the first editions of the alternative Twin Cities weekly, City Pages, founded by a former Southwest employee, Tom Bartel.
When phototypesetting chemistry costs soared in the early ’90s, Rolfsrud’s Jordan Independent became the first PC-based newspaper in the state to compose on plain paper. Others followed. Today all Southwest Newspapers composition is done on wide flat screens, with completed electronic pages transmitted directly to the printer in Red Wing. A high-speed network bonds all voice and data communications between the group’s six community offices. The company wrote its own software to track its advertising materials.
A committee of volunteers started the Eden Prairie Community News in 1974 but, soon tiring, sold it to McGarry in 1976. The News, along with the Herald, formed the nucleus of an emerging southwest suburban newspaper group, using the synergy of combined operations. Rolfsrud orchestrated the addition of the Prior Lake American and the Jordan Independent in 1979.
Then in 1980, Red Wing Publishing purchased McGarry’s interest in the Southwest group and added its own Shakopee Valley News, eventually buying out the remaining partners. In 1985 Rolfsrud became general manager of the growing five-newspaper unit. By 1987 Chanhassen’s population was large enough to support its own newspaper so he launched the Villager; in 1994 the Savage Pacer was founded in that fast-growing suburb.
To jump-start these fledgling publications, Rolfsrud pioneered a voluntary pay system which kept circulation under control while providing needed revenue for news operations. “Readers will pay for quality work,” Rolfsrud says.
“Now people ask me how long newspapers will last,” Rolfsrud adds. “They hope newspapers will survive because they’ve grown attached to the organic nature of the product. I just say that there will be many changes, but newsprint and ink will be in play throughout my lifetime.”
The industry is experiencing a dramatic and healthy shake-out right now, he says. “Organizations unwilling or unable to adapt to new realities will be left behind, those nimble enough to continue serving the interests of their customers will thrive. That’s the way it has always been. Developments like the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and the Internet have always doomed operations unwilling to compete or co-opt. If you know what you do and are flexible enough to keep doing it, you get to survive in the best job there is: telling the stories of interesting people.
“What society has learned from the Internet is that information is worthless unless you know who provided it,” he adds. “Consider the source, we say. Politicians and other powerful people discredit newspapers because doing so makes their lives easier. Consumers use brands they trust. We want to be trusted, not elected. Telling lies is bad for business. When we post something on the Internet and brand it with the name of a 150-year-old newspaper, readers believe it to be reliable, tested information, not smoke. Trust has always been the key to the survival and prosperity of Southwest Newspapers and of this industry.
“The people running Southwest Newspapers have good skills, values and flexibility. They’ll do very well after I’m gone.”
“Stan is truly a wonderful wordsmith, but his greatest gift to Southwest was big-picture thinking,” said Laurie Hartmann, director of the company’s business and classified ad departments and publisher of three of its newspapers. “He always looked for new ways to improve our papers and stayed current with industry innovation. When Stan commits to something, he leads by example, learning everything about the subject, so he can be the go-to guy. Southwest was known for its cutting edge, and many Minnesota publishers sought his advice.”
Rolfsrud still enjoys new technology. He posts movies on YouTube under the screen name “Dursflor.” He maintains two blogs, one for family, friends and anybody interested at www.rolfsruds.blogspot.com and another for his high school alumni at www.65roundup.blogspot.com. He gets about 100 cyber visitors daily.
“It’s a wonderful time,” he says. “In my college film class, you needed a glue bottle, scissors and a lot of patience just to make a splice. Now you can do it in seconds. What a great time to be alive!”
Rolfsrud looks back on his 35-year tenure with satisfaction. “Shareholders received an excellent return on investment, hundreds of employees worked challenging, fulfilling jobs, advertisers got messages reliably delivered and the community benefited from interesting, high-quality newspapers,” he said. “Now it is time for me to go away; I have nails to sort in the garage.”
The Rolfsruds have two grandchildren; the 2-year-old spends Wednesdays with them.
A portrait of Winston Churchill hangs in their Shakopee home. “Most people honor Churchill as a charismatic leader who rallied the Brits and defended the island from invasion. I also like that he was an excellent writer. He once said, ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’ And he did, and it is.”
Rolfsrud plans a trip with seven golfers to the classic Scottish courses this spring. He considers himself an average golfer and was delighted recently to learn that his handicap just squeaked by the cut-off for a tee time at St. Andrew’s. He winters at a golf villa in Tucson that he and Kathleen share with his two brothers and their wives.
Then what? “There’s much to do. For one thing, I would like to know what all those buttons, dials and menus on my digital camera do.”
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