Engaging you with hyper-local news

There’s a phrase in the journalism world that best describes what we’re all about at the Dodge County Independent. As the phrase goes, “We’re hyper-local news.”
And that’s a good thing for you. We’re able to provide a niche that can be very difficult to find anywhere else.
Journalism has certainly evolved over the years and seen its fair share of changes and challenges. Sometimes as a publisher it’s not easy to navigate through those rocky storms.
What I have learned over the past few years is that people crave local community news. I believe the pandemic drove home that point more than anything in recent memory. Among other things, it’s one way for them to stay connected to the community that they call home.
We take great pride in deploying our news staff to cover Dodge County. Our reporters are out in your community, talking to your leaders, your teachers, your businesspeople, your neighbors, your elected officials and the list goes on. We sit through school board meetings, city council meetings, county board meetings to learn what’s happening in your neighborhood.
Our coverage encompasses the successes and failures, the triumphs and tragedies of what happens around us. We are there to cover the things that actually impact your day-to-day lives.
It saddens me to think there are communities who don’t have what we’ve been fortunate to offer our readers. Earlier this year, eight newspapers shuttered in Minnesota, including one in my home area. The Hutchinson Leader closed down after more than a century of producing community news. Our own Alex Malm was the victim of losing his job at one of the other newspapers.
I ran into a woman recently who works for one of the cities impacted by the shutdowns. Besides being concerned about not having a newspaper to call their own, she was also frantic because they have no newspaper to publish the city’s legal notices.
Only you can help keep journalism alive. It comes through subscribing to the newspaper or purchasing advertising. I know we all like a hard bargain or getting something for nothing. But we have our newspaper moderately priced for the content you’re getting. Take this week, for example. Our paper contains 28 pages of content, all of which is local.
I love hearing the stories from readers who share that it often takes more than just a few minutes, most of the time hours, to read the newspaper. And I can’t tell you how many read the paper from cover-to-cover. Our paper isn’t like some that many have told us take only minutes to read.
I encourage you to check out our holiday special for new subscribers (and there’s also one for people who would like to renew).
I hope you’ll agree being hyper-local is going to keep us in hot pursuit of providing the community what it expects from its local media.