North Dakota Is Losing Its Print Papers, and While That May Be Sad, It’s Not Necessarily Bad
MINOT, N.D. — From the fourth grade up to my junior year in high school, I rose at about 4 a.m. seven days a week, in all manner of weather, to deliver a hundred or so copies of the Minot Daily News.
After I had finished, I would sit in my parents’ kitchen, often sweaty from muscling ad-stuffed Sunday editions through February snowdrifts or humid July mornings, and read our copy of the paper, with a big glass of orange juice, in the early morning dark and quiet.
It started with an interest in the comics, but as I grew, I began to get interested in the news stories too. And, eventually, the opinion section.
In hindsight, I suspect those early-morning interludes helped lead me to my present career, years before it would ever occur to me that I could make a living from writing.
So it was with no small amount of sadness that I read, last week, that North Dakota now has exactly zero newspapers that print seven days a week.
