Too many newspapers stand by mute while the rest of the world has opinions • South Dakota Searchlight

It was July of 1984 and I had just been named editor and general manager of The Redfield Press. That was quite a gamble for the people who owned the newspaper as all I had to recommend me was five years as an advertising salesman and a degree in English. 

Their gamble paid off in the best learning experience of my life. I learned how to write feature stories, cover government meetings, lay out newspaper pages and write editorials. It seemed only natural to me that the newspaper have an editorial every week. I grew up in Huron where the Plainsman had an editorial on most days. I’d just finished working for The Brookings Register where there was an editorial published in the paper every day. 

Teaching me how to write editorials held some urgency since the publisher, Roger Matz, and his wife were set to crew on a sailing ship that would take them on a weeks-long voyage around the Mediterranean. In those pre-internet days, there was no way Roger could email his editorial. I had to do it. 

Roger offered me, what I came to learn later, was a fairly remedial course in editorial writing. There were two kinds of editorials, he said: I could “point with pride” or “view with alarm.” His standard was that I had to point with pride 10 times before I could view with alarm once. (Years later, at a gathering of newspaper editors, I talked about Roger’s editorial writing lesson. Watertown Public Opinion Editor Gordon Garnos laughed and said there was one more kind of editorial. If I got real good at it, Gordon said, I could “damn with faint praise.”)

My career eventually led me to Pierre where I was the editor of the Capital Journal, which published five days a week. The newspaper was owned by the Hipple family. The family patriarch, Robert Hipple, in his time as editor and publisher of the Capital Journal, was known for often writing two editorials a day. 

Robert was retired when I knew him but, retired or not, I listened when he took me aside one day and said that I had to quit using columns from elected officials as “guest editorials.” Readers expect an editorial every day from their newspaper, Robert said, and that’s what I should give them. 

I took that instruction to heart and wrote five editorials a week for the 17 years that I worked at the Capital Journal. Some people, when they do the math on that, will have the opinion that it’s way past time for me to just shut up already. 

You’ve just waded through the world’s longest preamble because I wanted you to get a sense that I know, or at least I think I know, a thing or two about writing editorials.

That’s why it pains me so when I look at the state of editorial writing in South Dakota newspapers. 

During National Newspaper Week, Oct. 6-12, we celebrate newspapers and all that they do for their communities. To this day, newspapers are the best source for local news, sports, advertising and public notices. Editorials, however, have all but disappeared. 

Many newspapers, both weeklies and dailies, will dutifully publish “Editorial” pages. But those pages offer no locally produced editorials. Others may publish “Opinion” pages, but they steadfastly refuse to have any opinions themselves. Instead of editorials, on those pages you find editorial cartoons, letters to the editor and columns like this one.

The newspaper landscape has changed since that time 40 years ago when I first set foot in the office of The Redfield Press. Advertisers have found other places to invest, causing staff sizes to dwindle. Just as staffs were getting smaller, along came the internet. In addition to putting out a newspaper, editors had to figure out how to update a website. 

Something had to give and, for most editors in South Dakota, it sure looks like they chose not to invest the time and effort it takes to write an editorial. That’s too bad, because those editorials are needed now more than ever.