Weekly Owner Starts Charging for Endorsement Letters-To-Editor

By: Mark Fitzgerald Proctor (Minn.) Journal owner and Publisher Jake Benson admits the idea came to him just because he was hard up for something to write for the weekly's editorial. But the more he thought about it, the madder he got, and the better it sounded.

His idea: Charge for letters to the editor that endorse a candidate.

Now, the 2,000-circulation weekly near Duluth is the kind of community-focused paper that doesn't charge even for death notices or wedding notices. That's real news, Benson said in a telephone interview Thursday: "We're a small enough community that if there's a death, it affects us all in one form or another. We're all friends and neighbors."

So charging for letters to the editor that endorse candidates is out of character for the paper, Benson readily admits. "On the other hand," he added, "I should have done it long ago."

At the Proctor Journal, as with many small-town papers across the country, election year brings sacks of letters touting this candidate or that. They want the free publicity -- and, as Benson notes, they almost never want to take out an ad. At least not in the newspaper. Radio and TV, sure.

"The editorial was kind of born out the need to fill up editorial space -- and frustration of having letters coming from all over the place, from people outside of the community saying, support this individual or that," Benson said.

So as of last week, anyone who wants the paper to print their endorsement letter must pay 5-cents a word up to a limit of 200 words. And letter writers will please pay in advance, the editorial said.

Reader reaction was surprisingly positive, Benson said: "I thought I would get at least one person saying, 'Oh you're infringing on our freedom of speech.' But no. They sort of saw it as 'stick it to those politicians, no matter who they are.'"

Just before the deadline for this week's edition, the Journal got its first customer for an endorsement letter. "A county commissioner wrote on behalf of a county attorney," Benson said. "We told him he'd have to pay. He said, 'How much?' And we told him, and he said, great let's do it."

Benson describes the Proctor Journal as "pretty much the last independent newspaper" in the Twin Ports area. The paper, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, was bought decades ago by Benson's father, who had his own independent streak.

He was a charter member of the Newspaper Guild, who met his wife when she came to give apples to striking journalists walking a picket line, Benson said. His father later went to work for the Duluth News-Tribune. "When the Proctor Journal came up for sale, he thought it would be a lot more fun to run a paper," Benson said. Benson himself started on the paper after being drafted in the mid-1970s into the military, where he became a photo journalist.