Finally, I found the Rapid City Journal.
The office, I mean.
For those who haven’t noticed, the attractive, two-story brick building on the southwest corner of Fifth and Main in downtown Rapid City that once served as the Rapid City Journal headquarters is now a church.
Wait, what? Yeah, same here.
Rimrock Church of Johnson Siding west of Rapid City has opened a new downtown branch in the old Journal building. So what once was a place of words is now a place of, well, of course, The Word.
I suppose there’s some ironic symmetry in that. And I’m a big believer in symmetry and in The Word. Still, it’ll take some time for me to adjust to a church operating in the place where my old newspaper used to be.
Recently I stood outside that familiar front door, looking first at the Rimrock Downtown sign painted on the class and next at the old Rapid City Journal sign still mounted on the bricks high above. The incongruity of it all was hard to absorb.
Eventually, I gave up and went across the street to drown my sorrows in a chai-tea latte. It didn’t help much. And I was feeling sad as I drove home to post some of the pictures I took of the old Journal building on my Facebook page. They inspired a string of comments, including these:
“Makes sense to me,” wrote former Sioux Falls Argus Leader staffer Jeff Martin. “Randell Beck (former editor/publisher of the Argus Leader) always used to say that we were doing the Lord’s work!”
A “divine repurposing” or “downright profane?”
And this from Thomas L. Stritecky: “It’s unique what has changed, even in the past 10 years. Online has changed everything.”
And Daniel Feltman: “Probably taken off the tax rolls, too.”
Bob Newland: “Rather poetic, no?”
Rancher, writer, and former Journal staffer Linda Hasselstrom: “I think it's downright profane and I predict they might have to call in an exorcist before some of the shades of the folks I worked with at the Journal give up residence!”
Nancee Maynard: “SAD.”
Prudence Slaathaug: “From facts to fantasy.”
Brent Kertzman: “A divine repurposing.”
Candace Garry: “Yikes ~ this saddens me. Spent a short while working in that buzzing building after college before D.C. and loved it. Hope the Journal doesn’t go away completely because we enjoy reading it online. Still, it’s not the same. Can’t quite comprehend a church in that building, but, whatever.”
Nancy Sutterer: “Lee Enterprises has achieved its objective … to bury the RC Journal.”
Cindy Davies: “My grandmother taught me how to read using the RCJ at 4. She used to cuss the people who printed the paper, "prints smaller and fuzzier every day" so she counted on her grandkids to keep her up to date. Even after she was gone, I read the paper (carefully) when it arrived after school, keeping the pages/sections in order so that Dad could have a fresh newspaper when he got home. I got a paper in the mail when I was in college... now I don't read it at all. I tried a digital subscription but had so many technical issues I gave up. It's sad.”
Former Journal staffer Jim Holland: “If those walls could talk, I sure hope they don’t speak up during Sunday services.”
Sheri still knows where to find stuff, including the Journal
A couple of the commenters asked where the Journal is now. And I thought I should answer that question by searching out the new location, which I figured might also help me regain some of my lost newspaper bearings.
It wasn’t easy. It required some serious investigative journalism. Making calls. Checking with sources. Snooping around. Digging through files and records. Getting out on the street and putting some shoe leather into it.
You know, old school, Woodward-and-Bernstein stuff.
Except for one thing: I didn’t do any of that.
Instead, I looked around on Facebook for a while, took a few casual drives around town, and failed to find the Journal.
Then I did the smart thing: I asked my wife. And she suggested another smart thing: “Why don’t you ask Sheri?”
Oh, yeah. Ask Sheri. What value those two words once had to newsroom staffers at the Rapid City Journal.
Sheri Sponder was the go-to woman at the Journal in many ways for many years. And by many years, I mean 42. If you had a problem or a question or you were looking for a story clip or an old news file or a black-and-white photo from 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, you’d ask Sheri.
Sheri knew how things worked at the Journal, where things were and how to make difficult jobs a bit easier.
OK, wait, so it’s upstairs and down the hall?
Ask Sheri. Ah, the good old days.
Sheri doesn’t work at the Journal anymore. But she’s still Sheri. She still knows things. She still knows where to find stuff.
So I sent her a text. And within a minute or two, she sent a text back with the Journal’s new address: 1301 W. Omaha.
And I thought, “Wait, where’s that? Isn’t that Pancheros?”
Actually, it’s close. It’s the little strip mall along Omaha next to Pancheros. There’s a string of retail stores there, and a bunch of other businesses, including my buddy Jeff Olson’s second-floor dental office. And it’s where what’s left of the Journal exists today, with a dramatically downsized group of journalists doing their best to cover the news.
It’s not the easiest place to find, even once you know where it is. There’s no big sign on the outside of the building, as some of the businesses have. Inside in the main lobby, there’s a listing of offices and their numbers that includes: “209 Lee Consolidated Holdings/RC Journal.”
You might know that Lee Enterprises owns the Journal and a whole bunch of other newspapers, daily and weekly. Although “daily” probably deserves the quotation marks these days, since the Journal — like so many other “daily” newspapers — is no longer published every day, if by “published” we mean in an actual printed paper edition.
You remember that paper thing, right? The thing that carried the weight of the world when it landed on your step each morning? The thing could hold in your hands at the breakfast table each day?
Instead of daily papers, the Journal and other dailies eliminated the production and printing and distribution costs of thin editions on certain days of the week and loaded up for the three or four days that historically had more advertising and better readership.
From the middle of downtown to, well, sort of “witness protection”
That was just one of the changes, which seems sort of insignificant when compared to the decimation of newsroom staffs at the Journal and so many other newspapers.
So from thriving daily papers that supported full staffs and required large buildings to operate, many formerly daily papers have gone to small-staff storefront operations.
In the case of the Journal, it doesn’t even really have a storefront. It’s upstairs and down the hall at The Plaza along Omaha.
I went upstairs and strolled down the hall to 209. And there along with a law office and asset-management firm and home health care and coaching and counseling services was the Journal office. It’s a tiny place with eight or ten desks, most of which appeared from my limited view through the mostly glass door to be be unused.
I wanted to go in and wish the remaining staffers well in their work. They deserve it, just as they deserve our support in subscription payments, paper and/or online. But there was nobody home. And the door was locked.
So I walked wistfully away.
Then I drove home and posted a few pictures of the new Journal location on my personal Facebook page, and watched as the comments came in:
“Sad day,” Barbie Shepardson wrote in the first comment.
“Sort of like the witness protection program,” Matt Fitting added.
Kevin Ryan: “Pretty sad. Newspapers going the way of Blockbuster.”
David Super: “This is grim stuff. Irrelevance is next if the company is unable or unwilling to be more visible in the community.”
Former Argus reporter Corrine Olson: “Quit a posting. It hurts too much.”
Former Journal copy editor Paul Sauser: "I blame Lee.”
In another town, a former newspaper building become animal shelter
Former Journal staffer Jason Carr: “My last newspaper (Mohave Valley Daily News) was sold, but the building wasn’t part of the sale. They’re now in a former Sears Homefront store, and the old building is going to become … a city animal shelter.”
Linda Hasselstrom again: “This is heart-breaking to all of us who used to work for, and read, the RC Journal and similar newspapers. And wrong. We need newspapers, and reporters.”
Candace Garry: “Very sad — really hits home to see how it has been stripped down to this.”
Cheryl Rowe: “The digital world changes everything.”
Jay Kirschenmann: “Unreal, but somehow morbidly interesting. I saw your post from the new Argus Leader office the other day… The Aberdeen News is in a similar little rented space in a building with a lot of other businesses.”
Kirschenmann is a former newsman at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader and the Aberdeen American News. His comment about my post on the new Argus Leader office referred to a Facebook post I did based on pictures I got from Terry Nielsen in Sioux Falls, who worked at the Argus Leader many years ago.
Terry’s pictures show the new home of the Argus Leader, where I worked for 16 years in a couple of stints — about the same amount of time, also in a couple of stints, that I worked for the Journal. Instead of the venerable-looking building that dominated the corner of 10th and Minnesota in the Sioux Falls downtown area, the Argus Leader is now headquartered in a little building near the old arena that once housed a fire equipment company.
Those Argus Leader pictures prompted more comments, of course:
Jeremiah Murphy: “I hate to say it, but I think the old Shoppers’ News had bigger offices. No presses rolling under this new building, either. I miss newspapers.”
Celebrating the smaller survivors and new startups, but …
Former RC Journal freelance columnist Peggy Sanders: “I am thankful for the smaller, independent newspapers like the Fall River County Herald Star. The press is located in Martin and they print five papers for five different small towns/communities each week.”
Chuck Point: “There are new local news outlets that are developing. Follow them. Support them.”
Magazine publisher and former newspaperman Bernie Hunhoff: “Very sad to see. Social media/online media can never fill the shoes of what the Argus and other community paper teams accomplished for our towns and cities. I personally blamed mega-corporate ownership as much or more than the online competition. But regardless of the blame, it's a void.”
Bernie knows a lot more than I do about how to make a publication succeed. And I agree with him that the media corporations haven’t handled newspapers very well in the new age of internet challenges. But could they have done much to prevent the industry from sliding to where it is today? Could better management have avoided what seems like the inevitable, or simply delayed it?
I don’t know. But thinking about it reminds me of the scene in that wonderful South Dakota-filmed western Dances with Wolves when Lieutenant Dunbar is asked by his Lakota friends how many more white people are coming. After some thought, Dunbar says: “like the stars.”
And that’s kind of what came with the internet: Outlets and platforms for news and fake news and outright lies and all kinds of other information were/are like the stars. Platforms offered free ads and reduced-price ads and wider-viewership ads and often, especially in the early years, didn’t charge for viewing the platform itself.
On the failure to separate fact from fiction
In that onslaught of at-your-fingertips information, a surprisingly high (to me, at least) and disheartening percentage of viewers and readers were gullible and ultimately not able or not willing to use and develop the kind of careful discernment necessary to sort fact from fiction online.
And some didn’t want to be discerning. They simply wanted to affirm their beliefs, and it was easy to find websites and cable “news” commentators to do that.
All of that has only gotten worse over the years, professional news outlets like newspapers fell from the favor and less-credible and sometimes downright dangerous platforms charmed large chunks of the masses.
There is still a significant core of astute consumers out there who want and need professionally produced news and are willing to pay for it. But there aren’t enough of them — enough of us — to sustain the number of newspapers and other for-profit news outlets we used to have.
At least, not in the way we used to know them.
There is some good news: Non-profit news outlets are growing in number across the United States and local start-up news outlets are popping up — both often staffed with former newspaper reporters.
But many if not most traditional newspapers, which have long been the foundation of news coverage in this nation, are getting smaller and struggling more.
Which brings me back to being sad, and more than a little fearful for our future.
