Council Member Mike Mortenson Discussing The Daily Journal at Monday’s Meeting (The City of Fergus Falls YouTube Channel)
Fergus Falls, MN – A City Council Member has called into question if The Fergus Falls Daily Journal still qualifies to be the City’s legal publication going into 2025.
During Monday’s (January 6th) City Council Meeting, a resolution that would reestablish The Daily Journal as the City’s legal publication for 2025 was removed from the consent agenda by Council Member Mike Mortenson.
“One of the things that would be a very normal, very easy thing to do is place The Daily Journal as the official publication of the City, but we’re in historic times with The Daily Journal,” Council Member Mortenson said as he began to explain why he was hesitant to just pass the resolution with the rest of the agenda.
As of the beginning of this year, The Daily Journal made significant changes to its iconic publication, with it now taking on a “newsmag” format. Heather Kantrud, General Manager of The Daily Journal, wrote in an article explaining the changes, that the newsmag format blends the styles of a traditional newspaper with the more modern aesthetics of a magazine. Kantrud writes, “A newsmag is printed on newsprint, complete with traditional news sections, but contains some visual elements and ease of readability that is in alignment with that of a magazine.”
With a new format and a return to publishing once a week, Council Member Mortenson voiced his concerns about the publication qualifying for the resolution under Minnesota Law, citing Statute 331A.02. There is one subsection of this Statute that might be relevant to the changes at The Daily Journal. It states that a qualified newspaper shall be printed in the English language in newspaper format and in column and sheet form equivalent in printed space to at least 800 square inches. As the first edition of The Daily Journal with the newsmag format has yet to be published, it is difficult to determine if the publication will qualify.
“One of the things I want to make sure I’m doing right for the constituents of this city is making sure that they are still a legal publication,” Mortenson stated. “There’s numerous things in this (Statute) that I’m not aware of tonight if The Daily Journal is still fulfilling them. I would like to either have the publisher or someone from The Daily Journal be able to address this at the next Committee of the Whole (meeting) to make sure, 100%, that we’re doing the right thing as a city in keeping them as our newspaper and not messing up somewhere along the way with this.”
As of Monday night’s meeting, The Daily Journal was still listed on the Minnesota Secretary of State website as a legal newspaper. However, the fact that a newspaper has registered with the Minnesota Secretary of State does not prove the newspaper has satisfied all criteria necessary to be a legal newspaper.
On Tuesday, Kantrud and The Daily Journal provided a statement to KBRF, stating, “As a legal newspaper publication, we are required to file paperwork on an annual basis reporting changes in format and frequency. We completed that process in 2024 for the 2025 calendar year. All legal processes were followed, and further follow-up with the attorney for the Minnesota Newspaper Association solidified that Daily Journal meets every criteria of a legal publication in the state of Minnesota, further stating that the name Daily Journal Media does not mean that we are classifying the newspaper as a daily print publication — it is simply a name, and, ‘you can call yourselves whatever you want.’ We were not contacted by any member of the city council or city staff regarding this matter at any point, including up until this moment; however, we would have been able to dispel this concern rather quickly, as we have had an example of the publication on hand since before the announcement was ever made, and we ensured we were in align with all legal parameters prior to making the decision to change our format and frequency.”
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