A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Like many of you, the coronavirus pandemic has brought plenty of questions and extra stresses to our office and our homes since the governor began taking measures to try to limit the impact of a disease he knew was coming soon.
Weird, isn’t it, that we just got our first case here in Carlton County, yet there have been so many dramatic changes to our everyday lives?
Our goal here at the Pine Knot News has been to make sure our readers have the information they need to get through this time, by providing information about the disease itself, and by documenting and explaining the changes its arrival in the United States has brought to our lives locally.
We immediately created a COVID-19 section on our website, PineKnotNews.com, which you will find front and center on our homepage. We are using both the website and our Facebook page to communicate high-priority press releases and stories that simply can’t wait until the next week’s paper — at least for those who want to seek out information online. For those who’d like to be a little less stressed, the print paper has more than enough information.
We created listings (free to the businesses) of local grocery stores and pharmacies that deliver, and which local restaurants are still open and whether they offer drive-through, pickup or delivery. We know readers want this information (15,000, and counting, read the restaurant guide on our Facebook page) and local restaurants can certainly use the support.
Like other small businesses, we can use the support too, in more ways than one.
First, as you’ll see on Page 8, we’re hoping readers will write in and share stories of “life during a pandemic.” We hope you will continue to call, email, text and message about story ideas. Normal life goes on too, so we appreciate hearing about things outside of the pandemic.
As our advertisers suffer, so do we. So feel free to express your support for the Pine Knot News by subscribing if you haven’t already, or buying a gift subscription for someone you know will appreciate our treasure trove of local news. Then you (or they) won’t have to go farther than a mailbox to be up-to-date on the news.
We’d also like to share a wonderful bit of news we got last week, when we learned that the Pine Knot was the only newspaper in Minnesota to receive a $5,000 grant to help with the costs of covering the COVID-19 pandemic locally.
The money comes from a grant program by the Facebook Journalism Project, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Local Media Association, which announced the first 50 recipients from a $1 million fund to support COVID-19 news reporting to help fill immediate gaps for resource-constrained newsrooms. We will use it to continue our stellar coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, which we expect to be writing about for a long time.
Finally, we’d like to thank you for your support of the Pine Knot News, through your participation in our pages and your subscriptions.
Please stay safe, healthy, educated and engaged. And thanks for reading.
Jana Peterson is the editor of the Pine Knot News and has been writing about Carlton County stories for more than 10 years. Contact her at [email protected] or 218-213-1231.
