“It’s not always easy and
Sometimes life can be deceiving
I’ll tell you one thing;
it’s always better when we’re together.”
“Better Together” – Jack Johnson
I enjoy quite a bit of Jack Johnson’s music, especially when I’m looking for a mellow acoustic music setting to do some work or for bedtime tunes, but for some reason, I’d never really heard this song until I was discussing the rapidity of lyrics in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical and film scores with a friend who is a music instructor. I referenced that lyric speed and stated that it’s hard to imagine someone using such lyric speed in an acoustic guitar song rather than a showtune. She laughed and mentioned this song.
“Better Together” was released by Johnson in 2006 and never really gained traction. A live version of the track was released in 2009 and charted in the United Kingdom, but never here.
The song emphasizes all of the feelings of a relationship and summarizes it in the chorus line, repeating that things are better when together.
In March of 2020, the COVID pandemic had gripped Beadle County and Huron tightly. The county was the location of the first deaths due to the virus in the state, and the first major “lockdown” regulations were put in place in Beadle at that time.
For newspapers, that meant a significant loss of ad revenue as businesses weren’t exactly in a rush to encourage people to come to a business that they could not enter anyway. For the Plainsman, it meant a change from a six-day weekly publication to a five-day one. For Dale Blegen, it was the final nail in the coffin for the De Smet News and the Lake Preston Times, after forty years owning and editing the papers. The April 1 editions of both papers announced the permanent closure of the papers.
To say that the impact of those closures could have helped combat the advertising revenue loss the Plainsman was feeling is an understatement. As the nearest multi-day paper to the De Smet area, we technically were set to gain significantly in legal notice charges and also some potential advertising.
Instead, now-deceased Plainsman publisher Mark Davis was adamant that we would accept legal publications, but only as a temporary measure until something more permanent was in place to serve residents of De Smet and Lake Preston. Thankfully, the Kingsbury Journal opened up a new way of continuing community newspapers and served those communities. The story of how that was done is another column all its own.
Fast forward to August 2025, and the Plainsman was in the same boat. Some of the first contacts I received when the paper announced its closure were from governmental agencies, curious about where to send legal notices. Fortunately, the Huron City and Beadle County commissions were well-informed by their respective legal representation that legal notices could be temporarily reassigned, according to state statute, without having the location of declared legal notices permanently changed. Other communities affected by the shutdown of the Plainsman and our three fellow South Dakota papers, which were included in the NewsMedia closures, were not so well-informed, and readers attempting to find legal notices for their township or school board have struggled to find which publication now has those notifications.
A notable concern for me was those papers that went exactly opposite to Mark’s position just five years earlier. Papers actively campaigned to take the legal notices that were once sent to the Plainsman for their own publication, promising stories and coverage in exchange for those notices at school board and city commission meetings. For our Brookings paper, multiple Sioux Falls area publications took the brief closure of the paper as an opportunity to contract with Brookings businesses to sell their paper at their grocery store or gas station.
The Plainsman, Brookings Register, Redfield Press, and Moody County Enterprise were closed for 10 days.
The papers that made these moves were members in good standing with the South Dakota News Media Association (SDNA), which begins its annual convention next week in Deadwood. The theme for the convention is “Headlines and High Stakes,” and it seems fitting that member papers treated the potential “death” of one member of the organization as a chance to move in, akin to a plot claim in gold rush Deadwood.
I’ve had the chance to be interviewed by national journalism podcasts and other media outlets multiple times regarding our closure, and I always take the opportunity to thank the community that still strongly supports the paper, and I also often mention small-town papers that are doing things well or fostering new methods of providing the news, such as the Kingsbury Journal.
One place I don’t mention is SDNA. I know many people who are actively part of SDNA and fight hard for every paper, large and small, in the state. However, one of those who actively campaigned for legals that were actively contracted with the Plainsman at the time of our closure was someone who has been on the board of SDNA, sat in on the day recognizing journalism during legislative session, and sits on other boards for journalists across the state. And that person seems to represent a divide that I’ve noticed for a long time in the stated intent of SDNA, “We have South Dakota covered,” and the actions of the organization, which have often been to enhance certain organizations that are doing work that small, local papers do not have the resources nor the manpower to attempt.
A great example is right in the name of the organization. SDNA used to stand for South Dakota Newspapers Association. The change came as organizations such as South Dakota Searchlight and South Dakota News Watch joined SDNA and became members without a printed paper. Of course, that is truly a whole other medium, and I would have no issue with the SDNA story contests being altered to remove size and frequency of a paper and including television and radio stations in the state, as they are also media. Instead, digital-only or digital-first publications are included with the large paper publications, meaning it is near-impossible to ever receive recognition as a paper that has to adhere to the restrictions of the printed page and local focus when putting together stories rather than the ability to cover the biggest stories across the state as a media member.
When I first joined the Plainsman, I was one of eight people in the newsroom, with two proofreaders, a managing editor, a sports editor, a community editor, a news clerk, an assignment reporter, and myself. That meant I could be on phone calls for statewide press conferences to give a local flavor to the information being presented to the state. Now, that same newsroom has two members. I rely on the work of places like South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Searchlight, and News Watch to keep readers informed on statewide topics, but we don’t truly do the same work.
There is a place within news coverage of the state for all of our various niches, but they should be recognized and celebrated, not smoothed out to the point where the hard-working local papers who are fighting just to keep their heads above water feel like there’s now a foot pressing down on them as well.
Rather than finding ways to stoke division and seek out the “headlines” by competing, we can understand that we’re all better when each of us thrives independently. Attempting to undercut one publication doesn’t enhance your publication; it makes us all weaker as the public loses trust that the work being done by news media is done in an altruistic effort to keep the public informed rather than in search of the almighty dollar.
We’re better together, and the logical flip side to Johnson’s lyrical statement is that we’re also worse apart.
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