The Battle for Public Notices

In 2021, the Argus Leader, South Dakota’s biggest newspaper by circulation, stopped printing in-state. “That was very sad,” remembered Joe Sneve, who for more than a decade was a reporter at the Leader, which he called “the mothership.” Sneve, now forty-one, covers state politics; his family dates back five generations in Sioux Falls, where a city street shares his last name. The decision to go out-of-state was made by Gannett, the Leader’s parent company, which had been giving, Sneve told me, various directives to Leader staffers about how to do their jobs. “If we work hard and do it, they’ll quit laying off our friends,” he remembered thinking. But finally, he and a colleague, Jonathan Ellis, decided the writing was on the wall. “If we wanted to stay in journalism,” Sneve said, “we were going to have to make our own vessel.” The result was The Dakota Scout, a five-dollars-per-month news site with a free weekly paper companion.