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GEORGE HAGE: Newspapers on the frontier were less concerned to inform the communities in which they were published about their activities than they were to inform people back East about what a great place the particular frontier settlement was. And so the newspapers on the frontier sent their papers back in exchange for Eastern papers and in the hope, regularly realized, that they would be reprinted in the Eastern papers and that the things that they had to say about the territory would encourage migration to Minnesota.

ARCHIE SALYARDS: The days of, really, flamboyant reporting are over because when you had flamboyant papers, you had essentially flamboyant people. And I think S the nation was still virtually a series of frontiers, people did find it very unconventional and sometimes risky, perhaps irresponsible things that were extremely colorful, and consequently, the coverage of them was very colorful. I think the Pioneer Press today, like all newspapers in the country, is a considerably more sober paper. And, well, I would say it's primarily a sober paper because it's reporting on the lives of people who are generally more sober people.

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I'm basically interested in bringing about change and the cliché of making it a better world. You aren't going to get any change unless first you get ideas about a direction. Where are we going to go? And I think that's what the media should do, is suggest directions, and having done that, present arguments why we should go that way. And it may take 5, 10, 15, 20, 50 years, depending on the particular goal that you take.

And some days, they're very short goals. And some days, they're very far-ranging goals. But the point is that the populace is not going to elect men to move the country in a particular direction or move a county in a particular direction, or even a city or a school board, until they have some concept in their mind of where they're going to go.

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SPEAKER: A Sense of Place, a documentary series which looks at regions and regionalism in the state of Minnesota, produced by Minnesota Educational Radio under a grant from the Minnesota Humanities Commission. This program is called All the News That's Fit.

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Where are we going to go? James Madison Goodhue, when he issued the first edition of the state's first newspaper, the Minnesota Pioneer, in April of 1849, seemed to have little doubt we, or our ancestors, were going to go to Minnesota if he had anything to say about it. We were going to come out here to the free, fertile, healthful Northwest. And he asked, is it too much to predict for this young territory a rapidity of growth unparalleled even in the annals of Western progress?

Once here, of course, he would not hesitate to instruct us as to where our political interests should lie. George Hage, University of Minnesota journalism professor.

GEORGE HAGE: He sized up the political situation very quickly and allied himself with the political forces of Henry Hastings Sibley. He became a partisan of the Democratic faction led by Sibley. And there were bitter battles with another faction led by Rice. In addition to being-- or really, more important than being a political partisan of Sibley's, he was a promoter of the territory.

Because Goodhue was a colorful writer and a vigorous writer, his articles about Minnesota Territory were quite frequently reprinted in Eastern papers. And this stimulated quite a bit of correspondence to him. People back East would write and ask specific questions.

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SPEAKER: In his book Newspapers on the Minnesota Frontier, Hage recorded Goodhue's enticing descriptions of the region.

GEORGE HAGE: Saint Paul, which is the principal commercial town on the Mississippi, is situated upon a bluff some 75 or 100 feet above the river on its outward sweep, commanding a view of the stream for a distance of some 2 miles. The face of the country in the rear, that is north of the town, is quite uneven and is made up of oak openings, mirrored by numerous little ponds.

Saint Paul has about 800 inhabitants, most of whom have sprouted up within the last few months. We have already most of the material comforts of life. We are usually visited by four steamboats a week. And Galena, Dubuque, and Saint Louis, though the latter town is some 800 miles south of us, seem like neighbors. Their citizens frequently drop up to make us a call.

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His competitors, other newspaper editors, readily admitted that he had done more to promote the territory than anyone else in the community. So yes, I think that the people on the spot in Saint Paul did feel that he was an effective spokesman, who gave them a sense of loyalty and pride and commitment to building Saint Paul and the territory.

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SPEAKER: And so it began, not only the building of a city or territory, but the building of a communications network that would seek to inform and influence the lives of the people who had come to Minnesota. In time, newspapers in the Twin Cities became more sophisticated, if less colorful. But to this day, a quaintly provincial tone remains in many papers in other regions of the state.

Archie Salyards has been a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a direct descendant of the original Goodhue newspaper, and presently serves as editorial writer for the Duluth Herald News-Tribune. He offers some insights about the journalistic process in smaller communities.

ARCHIE SALYARDS: If you're writing about a utility or a judge or a police chief, or whatever, in a community of this size, which is 100,000 people, your comments are more likely to be taken on a personal basis. And I guess to go more to the heart of the matter, in a larger community, there is more of a willingness and just a simple inclination on everyone's part to make this distinction between a person as a professional and a person as a person.

And it's much more easy to run a newspaper and do some of the things that newspapers should do in a larger community because most of your critical and investigatory efforts would be done on a professional plane.

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Duluth sits between the Iron Range, which is about 60 to 70 miles north of here, and to the south, we have Superior, Wisconsin. And though we would like to-- we try by way of editorials and news stories to develop a regional metropolitan concept for Superior and Duluth, we have an underlying feeling that the readers in Superior perhaps look at this as Reaganism and that precisely the opposite way to get something done or the wrong way to get something done in Superior is to suggest to Superior how it should do something because any opponent simply has to say, are we going to let those people in Duluth tell us how to run our city?

Similarly with the Iron Range. The Iron Range is mainly the district where taconite and iron ore is dug out of the ground. And Duluth gains benefit of that merely by virtue of our sitting at the head of the lakes, where the ore has to come through here to get on boats. And consequently, there's an ongoing animosity. But we believe that primarily by humor, I suppose, and a continual personal face-to-face effort, that we can get these regions together.

You can't do it by editorial or news stories, by that type of effort alone. We have to physically go to Superior and meet people there and talk to them, physically go to the Iron Range, or people there come down and talk. And when you get to know each other, I suppose it's similar to international affairs. If you get to know each other on a personal basis, then whatever concepts for unity you can convey in the newspaper will not only get to a person's head. But if you've talked to his heart, the union will come.

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SPEAKER: Where are we going to go? Print journalists no longer have the field to themselves, but Salyards believes they have a unique opportunity to suggest what the direction might be.

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ARCHIE SALYARDS: In terms of setting direction, if you have a compass and you want to pick a direction, you hold that in your hand very steady. And you look at it, and you concentrate, and you find a direction point. And you look at it again and verify it. And I see a newspaper like that, where it will stand still, and you can get your ideas together and debate with yourself whether this is a good direction or not.

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SPEAKER: The advent of radio in the 1930s and '40s provided an additional means of putting people in touch with what was happening in their communities, their region, their state. But while radio struggled to develop its own style of disseminating information, it borrowed or, as some might say, stole freely from the established print medium. In 1943, University of Minnesota Journalism Professor Mitch Charnley helped create the first radio news operation at WCCO in Minneapolis.

And about the same time, Jim Payton was working at WEBC, the original radio station in the Duluth-Superior market. Their experiences were remarkably similar.

JIM PAYTON: There was a bitter feeling between the two, between the print and the air. And for a long time, I think we were some-- we were guilty of this to some extent. When the first edition of the morning paper would come out, it would come out just about the time our evening news was getting ready. And we would always rush out to get it to see whether their headlines had been the same as our headlines and all that and try to decide whether we'd done better than they. And for a long time, the papers wouldn't even mention broadcasting.

MITCH CHARNLEY: And it's almost humorous. The first arrangement in 1930 that we officially made with the management of the Duluth Herald News-Tribune come about after we established studios in Duluth, Minnesota. Previous to that time, WEBC was exclusively Superior in operation. The first agreement or rather a tenuous thing with a Colonel Henry, was the gentleman's name at the Duluth News-Tribune, was he said, you can come over and take some of those dupes off our Associated Press or United Press-- I forget which it was-- and take them out of here.

You can also take a few dupes of local stories if the reporter wants to make the dupe available to you. I'm not going to broke them because they look upon you people with a little bit of a jaundiced eye anyway as radio nuts, was the usual expression.

JIM PAYTON: At that time, Cedric Adams was the best-known radio newsman in the area. And Cedric would rush into the studio at 1/4 of 10:00 with the Evening Star or The Journal in his pocket. And as he got into the studio, he would open the paper and look at it. And he'd see some things he wanted, and that would be the basis of his broadcast. And he was a genius at that level. There are low-level geniuses and high-level geniuses.

And he really was a genius because he knew how to take the news-- and he was pretty accurate-- and to put his personality into it. We had a problem with Cedric because Cedric said, look, I can do this. Look how high my ratings are. Look how much money I bring in. I can do it. And Zig and Jocelyn and I said, that isn't good enough. We're going to improve what you do.

And so we had quite a time to persuade Cedric to let us write his copy for him. It was a struggle there. I suppose it took two months, something like that. And he discovered that we could write copy that he could use and that we somehow were able to catch his personality.

MITCH CHARNLEY: Bit by bit, radio as such established itself as an authentic news source. all of this, of course, albeit that in the morning, we took shamelessly the Duluth News-Tribune and read it verbatim. The papers, of course, were up in arms over the thing. They didn't want to say anything publicly because it's like they sort of hoped that radio was going to go away anyway. And they didn't like to call attention to the fact that there was a media called radio.

So they didn't say anything about it in the papers, but privately, they let our owners and our managers and, in many instances, staff know. And of course, we lied, which was the simplest thing to do. But as I say, I did that hundreds of times. You would always put a little X with your black pencil over the stories you were going to read and then put a line down at the end of the paragraph where you were going to stop so that if you looked at an issue of Duluth News-Tribune at 10 o'clock in the morning in the studios at WEBC, it was pretty well X'ed up because you'd given them pretty much the news.

JIM PAYTON: Austin Jocelyn was manager of WCCO radio. And he was a man who got the view that not very many broadcast managers have ever gotten that news was something by itself and that a good news operation had to be, first of all, a good news operation. And when he described to Zig and me what he wanted done, he said, I will never put my nose in this newsroom. And he didn't.

He said, I'm hiring you because I think your news people. And so we had that flavor. My print friends used to snigger at me when I would put on a radio news show. But we got over that.

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SPEAKER: When television added picture to voice transmission, it added another element as well. Newspeople found themselves with a burden and responsibility they hadn't had to contend with before, adequately serving a vast geographical area and doing it through a medium that was to become the most powerful communications tool of the era. Today, northeastern Minnesota is served by three television channels, all located in Duluth.

It is perhaps the most interesting market in the state since fierce competition for ratings and advertising dollars have demanded of each outlet a kind of excellence not normally found outside the Twin Cities. Locally originated newscasts are produced with concern for feeding the information hunger of the entire as if life depended on them. And indeed, because television is such an expensive medium, the life of each station depends, in large measure, on the ratings its news programming can muster.

Don LeMasurier has worked in Duluth television since the first VHF stations went on the air in the mid-'50s and is presently program director at WDSM TV. Dick Gottschald is news director at WDIO, the ABC affiliate which went into operation in 1966.

DON LEMASURIER: In the earlier before pre-TV days, most of the media were hometown media. Radio, each city had a station. Each city had a newspaper. There was no media that really crossed all of the boundaries and served all of the people in the region. Television, because there are fewer stations, I guess, does that now. One television station in Duluth, for instance, has the capability of talking to a million people. And of course, no media before could have done that.

So in 1954, actually, when the VHF stations came in, suddenly, there were a million people who were served by one central communication source. Previously to 1954, there was, of course, the UHF station. But UHF range is not such that people could see it far away on the Range and Wisconsin, and so on. So it was really the VHF stations that created an area-wide communications media.

DICK GOTTSCHALD: I think that people have probably become acclimated to watching the tube because of the short summers and the long winters and not much else to do at night. And you get into a habit of watching the tube, and maybe you become addicted a bit to it. And television news in this market is well done, much better done than the print journalism that comes out of this market.

And I think that a typical television news viewer is probably just as well or maybe a little better informed than the viewer that reads the newspaper in Duluth, Superior, this area. I'm not sure that we should attempt to compete with the print media, but in this market, we do. And we do so successfully because of two reasons. Number one, all three television stations are running good news operations. They're running what I would consider to be outstanding small-market news operations, all three stations.

Another thing is the newspapers in this market are not strong. They're not investigative. They're not probing. And I think that this has had an effect on what the television-- or what the news reader, viewer, the person who seeks news and knowledge, does with his time.

DON LEMASURIER: Why the quality? I don't know. Quality has been a thing that the broadcasters in this market have sought after for a long time. When we first went into television here, we looked very hard at our closest neighbor, which was Minneapolis. And Minneapolis does things so very well. And so everyone in Duluth patterned themselves after the Minneapolis market, not realizing we were too small to do it that well.

Had a lot of help because we had good, close, longtime associations from those people. And we were able to pattern procedures, especially in the news area, after those Minneapolis stations. And as I say, we didn't realize that we were too small to do that. We were not supposed to succeed that well. And of course, once you start, the competition among yourselves gets to be fierce because your competitor does things very, very well. In order not to look terribly bad, you have to do them almost as well, or try at least. So it's been competition that has made any quality that we have.

DICK GOTTSCHALD: WDIO television in 1966, about four months after we went on the air, decided that we were going to go into the news business. And I guess maybe more than anyone else, I was able to convince the management that they should make the commitment and spend the money. And I told them it would be very expensive, and it is. It's almost too expensive. And in the ensuing years, we hired good staff people and went into a television news operation.

And up until that time, the market had been seeing radio news being read into television for the most part. I worked at another television station in the market. And we were trying, but we didn't exactly know what we were doing. And I think that combined with the emergence of television as a news form in the country, combined with this and the intense competition that was fostered by the arrival of the third television station in the market trying to do a good job of reporting news, I think that is what moved this market into prominence and almost saturation of the electronic journalism.

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I guess that the most that we can expect is to inform. And if that accomplishes that purpose of pulling the region together, that's good. And I'm not sure that it does. I'm not sure, but maybe good journalism sometimes tends to divide. Our area, northern Minnesota, has just suffered tremendously from a lack of people and a tremendous outmigration that I don't think anybody has really carefully cataloged. One of the reasons they haven't is because I think they're afraid to see what the actual results are, that young people have just gone. They vanished.

This is an old market. And I don't think that television journalism has accomplished anything in the area of pulling the whole region together. I can't see that that's happened. I think that the people in International Falls are probably a lot more aware of what's going on in Duluth than they should be, than they need to be simply because television news just comes from Duluth. But I think in terms of trying to make the area more cohesive, I really don't think there's been that much impact.

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Some nights, it's way above the show business. Some nights, it's extremely informative. Some nights, we're tremendously proud of what we do, just tremendously proud of what we do. And other nights, we know that we've just struck out all the way around and that we haven't accomplished what we set out to do. Television news depends, to some degree, upon the cooperation that you're able to get from the people because unlike pen and pencil reporting, once you get the guy to say it, you've almost always got to get him to say it again on film.

And most of the time when somebody has made a remark that embarrasses themselves, they certainly aren't going to repeat it for the benefit of the camera and for the whole world to watch them. So from that standpoint, unless you're capable of going out and shooting from the hip and doing the spontaneous television journalism, which is really the only good journalism, you run into some very serious technical handicaps.

And I guess that I would have to say that television is struggling. Sometimes it does a tremendously superior job, and sometimes it does a very inane and almost uncomprehending job. It can get into stories that it cannot cover.

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DON LEMASURIER: We've had economic problems in the area. And we're attempting to outline some of the problems, if nothing else, and maybe point some directions for the future. Again, it's a responsibility we have to the area because the area supports us and depends on us. And we, of course, are vitally interested in seeing health and growth and a good economy because it improves our position. We might get a raise.

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DICK GOTTSCHALD: There's a lot of things wrong in this country. And I think that journalism has an obligation to try to point those out. And that's why you see so much bad news on television, is because what is right about the country is good, and it's evident to people. What is wrong sometimes is hidden and is really an abrasive factor in breaking down certain elements within our society.

And I think that if we're going to survive in this kind of a society, we've got to make some changes. And journalism is the chronology of the change that has to be made.

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SPEAKER: Where are we going. Goodhue's early journalistic efforts were pointed mainly in the direction of territorial growth and something called progress. And while newspeople in all of today's media speak of working for change and pointing direction, their goals are not much more long range than his were a century ago. But Bill Weir of community information systems at Jonathan in Carver County has done some serious crystal ball gazing. Cable television, he believes, will radically alter not only the amount and kinds of communication available to Minnesotans, but the very structure of the society in the state as well.

BILL WEIR: Oh, there's an information overload already, as you well recognize. And the information overload comes, in part, by our being given information that is irrelevant to us too much of the time. When we move into this era of two-way cable, in combination with microwave and satellite, people will be able to use this powerful communications instrument to select the communications they want when they want it.

It can put them in touch with other people as part of a meeting in a sense, an electronic meeting, if you will, not just a conference telephone call, but going beyond what you can do over that narrow band of a telephone line into what visual communications makes possible, where you're able to respond to one another almost as we do now side by side. There's a sense of really being there. And each one of these locations where you can originate on the cable will almost be like, I think, a window onto the-- an opening onto the entire world, a magical room like the Wizard of Oz might create.

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The world changes with the advent of this new communications tool. It can be used, I think, to tyrannize if we ignore the opportunities that cable provides through its abundance of channels for public access for all kinds of educational library access services beyond what any of us have thought of yet. We're trying to do that forward thinking, that futuristic work, bringing it down to Earth in the work of community information systems at Jonathan and elsewhere to find out what is really cost effective now and what people want in the way of the use of this powerful instrument, the cable.

The future may bring into our homes, our offices, our clinics, our schools a place of not just George Orwell's telescreen. On the contrary, it will be a place where we originate what we want. It may be, at the beginning, just a digital origination saying, I want number 2,985, a program that's available to me on a channel that is reserved for this kind of call-up of a program when the person wants it.

It might be a program that is merely entertaining. It might be last night's city council meeting or some segment of it. It might be some information from a library that I need in order to complete the paper I'm researching right now. It might be some information I need in order to make a decision for my business. At first, yes, we will have to go to the simple, little studio. It might be in the elementary school down the block. But eventually, we'll be able to plug a camera into any home outlet.

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Our state may be a great pioneer in creating that sense of place through the cable system that makes people feel, I've got an opportunity to get what I need to surround my life with what fulfills life, what gives me a handle on changing things the way I think they ought to be changed, or at least participate in that process. It radicalizes the sense of neighborhood, sense of region, and it makes possible the creation of a more realistic sense of what our place is.

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SPEAKER: Norman Cousins writing in Saturday Review October 24, 1970. "The significance of communications has seldom been more pithily expressed than in Aristotle's comment that the size of a political unit is determined by the range of a single man's voice. He was thinking, of course, of the Greek world, where all the citizens of a city-state such as Athens could assemble in one place and attend to their common affairs."

According to this yardstick, the entire world today is a potential single community. There is no part of the globe that is not within the range of a single man's voice.

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Music from the album Stockhausen, electronic music on the DGG label. And special thanks to George Hage for reading from his book, Newspapers on the Minnesota Frontier, published in 1967 by the Minnesota Historical Society.

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A Sense of Place was written and produced by Claudia Daly for Minnesota Educational Radio under a grant from the Minnesota Humanities Commission. Engineering by Glenn Owen.

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