Protesters surrounded the century-old Forum Communications building in Fargo on Wednesday. Despite rain and snowfall, about 60 people lined the perimeter, chanting as they held up protest signs and photos of the three left-leaning columnists who were let go from the newspaper last week.
Protesters expressed their disappointment with the paper, which many of them had been reading their entire lives.
“What we're seeing now is cutting back on opinions, taking away the voices that spoke for a lot of us — I can't support that anymore,” Karen Eriksmoen said. “It's hard because I know people who work there and have worked there for years and years and years, and I also really respect some of the reporters that do great work.”
Eriksmoen and several other protesters said they’re canceling their subscriptions.
Forum Communications owns newspapers and TV stations throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana and both Dakotas, and articles are shared between those publications. Its flagship paper, The Forum, is in Fargo.
In addition to laying off three columnists, The Forum announced it will only be printing its opinion page twice a week, rather than daily.
In a short statement sent to MPR News, Fargo Communications president Bill Marcil Jr. said the changes to the opinion section were “strictly a business decision based on data and feedback from our readers.”
And in the paper, the editorial board wrote the changes will allow the paper to “be choosier about creating a better balance of voices.”
The dropped writers
Jack Zaleski was hired by the Fargo Forum as editorial page editor more than 30 years ago for that same purpose: to bring balance to the page, which he said had been viewed as “the newsletter of the Republican Party.”
“The publisher, (William C.) Marcil, wanted me to expand and broaden the reach of the editorial page, broaden its appeal to our readers, so that we were open to all voices, no matter where they were on the political spectrum,” Zaleski said. “That was the charge, and that's what I did; and it worked, and we had an award-winning editorial page.”
At the same time, Zaleski began writing his column, further balancing out The Forum’s editorial board, which had endorsed the Republican nominee in every presidential election from 1968 until 2012.
Zaleski said he has opinions that span across the political spectrum, but he was still among those fired last week as columnists to the political right continue to write for The Forum.
“I don't know how you can bring more balance to the page by removing some of the factors on the page that made for balance,” Zaleski said. “I'm not sure if that's an argument that's going to fly.”
He said the political ideology of the people making the decisions about the paper “no longer has room for the kind of balance that they claim to want to have.”
In his final column, Zaleski urged readers to “no matter what, keep reading,” but he noted his disagreement with the changing direction of the paper.
Columnist Joan Brickner, on the other hand, who was also let go from the paper, said she’s cancelling her subscription.
In her final column, she wrote that after the 2024 election, “The Forum clipped my wings, saying that columnists were to limit their focus to local and regional issues or people. I could draw on regional senators' or representatives’ views on national issues, but I could not address national issues head on.”
Speaking at the protest Wednesday, she said The Forum has at times refused to print her columns, including one about the Trump Administration’s “anti-DEI” agenda.
“I'm disappointed, greatly disappointed,” she said. “To find out you're going to disappear altogether no matter what you write about was … strange. I just hope people keep fighting against any authoritarian demands.”
Jim Shaw’s final column also published last week. He’s been a journalist in Fargo for almost 50 years, and he said there were warning signs that the spirit of the paper was changing, including the mandate to only focus on local stories.
“I never saw this coming. Although, in hindsight, I probably should have,” he said.
Forum following national trends
Across the country, newspapers have tough decisions to make, and often that means shrinking their opinion sections. That’s according to Benjamin Toff, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota.
“(Newspapers) are rapidly disappearing and closing in many communities, and those that are continuing to survive are often one- or two-person operations that are really struggling to even cover the important events and issues that are in those communities,” he said.
USA Today Co. announced a similar move in 2022. The company, formally known as Gannett, owns hundreds of news organizations and cut back the outlets’ opinion sections, citing it as the least-read content and a frequent source of cancellations.
“I think it's also a reflection of how polarized the country is,” Toff said. “And I think people do feel, to some degree, kind of burned out from national political debates. And so it's probably partly a response to that.”
Shaw said he thinks The Forum’s decisions are part of a more worrying trend.
“Those who dare criticize those in power, those voices are being muffled,” Shaw said. “Stephen Colbert, who's going to be gone in May. Jimmy Kimmel was gone for a while. At the Washington Post, they had an editorial ready to go to endorse Kamala Harris for president, and the owner, Jeff Bezos, stepped in and said, ‘No, you're not publishing that.’”
“It's far and wide,” he added. “I think people are very much afraid of Donald Trump and what he could do.”
