South Dakota, with 66 counties, still has 94 weekly papers

The Kingsbury Journal is a weekly produced by volunteers and three part-time employees.

Weekly newspapers in South Dakota are bucking the national trend of newspapers' decline, Bart Pfankuch reports for South Dakota News Watch, a nonprofit that covers statewide stories and is funded by foundations, news-media organizations and other contributors.

The state has one of the highest densities of weeklies, with 94 in 66 counties, down from 128 in 1995, David Bordewyk, executive director of the South Dakota Newspaper Association, told Pfankuch, who reports, "Weekly paid circulation has also fallen by roughly half over the past four decades, from a high of about 200,000 in 1980 to 100,000 now, which equates to about 250,000 individual readers."

Only three counties in South Dakota lack a local newspaper. Kingsbury County, which has three, almost lost two of them in 2020. When the weeklies in Lake Preston and the county seat of DeSmet "were facing closure . . . a group of community members stepped in to buy, rebrand and relaunch the papers as the Kingsbury Journal, which serves the county as a whole, rather than the individual towns within it." One reason South Dakota has so many weeklies is that many are focused on one or two towns.

"Other than three part-time employees, the newspaper and website are produced by unpaid volunteers within the region," Pfankuch reports. "The paper has 1,300 print subscribers and sees heavy and steadily increasing use of its website, both by locals and people who live out of town, said Sheryl Downes, office manager at the Journal."

In a sidebar, Pfankuch profiles three weeklies: the Clark County Courier, which has a 23-year-old publisher, Karli Paulson, who still loves with her parents and bought the paper from a longitme owner who spent five years looking for a buyer; the Brandon Valley Journal, which local-journalism veteran Jill Meier started in 2016 after Gannett Co. "shuttered its operation in Brandon;" and Mandy Scherer, who owns five weeklies in southwestern South Dakota and northern Nebraska. Pfankuch calls her the “hardest working woman in South Dakota newspapers.”