Photo: Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

The rapid devolution of print journalism is regularly lamented for all the right reasons – among them the losses of investigative voices, institutional memories and checks on the powerful. A less-noted side effect is cities’ loss of revenue from recycling newsprint.

Last year Minneapolis recycled fewer than 10,000 tons of newsprint for the first time since at least 1993, according to the city’s Solid Waste and Recycling department, with residential newsprint pickup accounting for only 5 percent of the total recycling collected by the city. Compare that to 15,000 tons of newsprint recycled in 1998, more than 9 percent of all materials that year.

Everything about newspapers is getting smaller, according to department head Susan Young. “Newspapers are using thinner paper,” Young says. “The pages are not as tall or as wide, and ads [particularly inserts] are way down.”

Minneapolis earns top dollar for its recycling because residents sort by type of material — newsprint, glass, aluminum and so on — whereas many communities, including St. Paul, collect mixed recycling, which is worth less.

In Minnesota, 40 percent of municipal solid waste is recycled, according to Recycle More Minnesota, for an annual payout (as of 2006, including sales of waste to energy facilities) of $10 million.

In 2007, Young’s department added $1.9 million to city coffers by collecting and marketing sorted recyclables. This year, she says she’ll be lucky to clear half that amount, projecting a net income of $800,000–900,000: “My worst year in a while.”

That’s due in large part to declining markets for most materials. But because newsprint and aluminum consistently account for the largest shares of what Minneapolis has to market, she also lays the precipitous decline at newspapers’ doorstep.

Part of the problem: People take papers delivered at home to read on the way to work or on the job, where they aren’t as likely to be recycled — or at least not on the city’s residential collection routes.

Still, Minneapolis is better off than cities that don’t sort and are “hemorrhaging money,” as Young puts it. In Blaine, for example, residents now pay a fee of $11 per month to have recycling picked up.

A representative at Veolia Environmental Services, the private company that picks up recycling in Blaine and eight other local cities, said a single stream of mixed recyclables makes it hard to measure trends in quantities of newsprint. The impact on St. Paul is likewise unclear, where a spokesperson said the recycling point person left the city’s employ late last year.

Both Blaine and St. Paul have their recycling taken to Eureka Recycling for sorting. (Repeated calls to Eureka for this story weren’t returned.)

The impact on cities in which citizens sort their recyclables is likely greater than elsewhere, since they have a more lucrative product to sell. Young proudly asserts that the newsprint Minneapolis collects, however skimpy by comparison to past years, is still a higher-value item than other cities’ “newspaper drenched in beer.”

(Speaking of beer, beverages that come in glass are fueling a rise in tonnage for that material in Minneapolis: from 4 million tons in 2003 to almost 6 million tons last year. And that’s mostly drinks, Young reckons: “You don’t buy pickles [or other foods] in glass anymore.”)

Young will ask the three local recyclers — Allied Recycling, Waste Management and Eureka — to bid for the city’s recycling business when the current contract with Allied runs out next year. She expects the drop in newsprint to make a dent in the size of the offers she receives, but there’s not much she can do about it.

“All I can do is take what people give me,” Young says.

But recycling markets are cyclical like any others, and Young expects even newsprint to stabilize. “People want their local news. Even I, who am supposed to be really tech-savvy, … like to be able to settle in with the newspaper.”

Young has a Friday-through-Sunday subscription to the Star Tribune and expects many Minneapolis residents will keep receiving — and recycling — at least weekend newspapers.

If the bankrupt Strib eventually goes bust? Readers will take the St. Paul Pioneer Press, she says, plus there are the community newspapers.

One community newspaper, The Bridge, won’t be weighing down recycling bins on the east and southeastern sides of Minneapolis. The Bridge just published its last printed edition (it’s now online-only).

That was news to her.

Dominating the cover is Steve Brandt’s story about legalizing bee-keeping in Minneapolis, titled “They’re abuzz with the news.” The story jumps to the section’s back page, where it continues under the headline “Creating a buzz.” There, it’s placed alongside a photo with this caption (emphasis added):

At the Metrodome, actor Bee Vang helped U of M students conduct a social experiment on creating buzz around someone to draw the attention of total strangers. Vang starred in the movie “Gran Torino.”

As it happens, the photo belongs to an adjacent story: Gail Rosenblum’s column on the Campus People Watchers, a University of Minnesota student group that organizes outings for the purpose of seeing whatever they happen across.

The organization has been written up in two proper newspapers but got its “big break,” Rosenblum writes, after a Web site called suite101.com named it one of the country’s weirdest college groups. Membership “fluctuates from about 12 to 20.” So for now, these serendipity-seekers are still outnumbered by newspaper readers.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press tips its hat to persistent citizens who read the fine print and demand to know the truth.

So here’s to the little old lady who insists on seeing the fine print in the bus contract the school district signs. Here’s to the grumpy old man who demands a clear answer when he asks the city council why it’s getting up to go behind closed doors. Here’s to the fed-up taxpayer who wants to see official e-mail to understand better why so-and-so got a tax break. Here’s to the cranky partisans who scour the campaign contributions of political candidates and who raise hell when the reports thereof are late. Here’s to the ornery bloggers who mine the Web for source documents and more.

Here’s also to the many public officials and employees who understand that public information belongs to the people, not to the government, and here’s to librarians, attorneys, reporters and civic groups who walk the beat for openness.

The St. Cloud Times devoted two editorials to the topic this week. The first editorial calls for openness at the state and local level while the second called for a federal shield law.

Continued: Click “Read more”

Look no further than this board’s recent effort to push the St. Cloud City Council from its desire to conduct monthly study sessions with, well, less-than-optimal sunshine. Last summer, rather than use the technology taxpayers bought for them to broadcast such meetings, a majority of the council voted to not televise these sessions.

Several editorials, recording efforts by this board and an election in the fall finally forced a majority of the council to agree to let the sun shine in.

Unfortunately, such sunshine has yet to reach all corners of St. Cloud government. Based on minutes posted on its Web site and confirmed by executive director Bruce Thielman, the St. Cloud Housing & Redevelopment Authority’s board since at least 2006 has routinely held an untelevised special meeting immediately preceding its televised monthly meetings.

So what’s the thinking of HRA board members? Let all the sun shine in only after they’ve had a chance to discuss issues with the cameras off?

But such actions are nothing compared to what Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s administration wants to do regarding the contact information of people who volunteer to serve on public bodies that conduct the public’s business. The state wants to keep those addresses and contact
information private.

The Worthington Daily Globe cites a recent study showing that “three quarters of American adults view the federal government as secretive” and looks to newspapers to take the lead.

Of course, it should be noted that it’s almost natural to possess a distrust of government. From the Watergate scandal of the Richard Nixon years to the various controversies that encompassed Bill Clinton’s presidency – and now, the recent fall from grace of New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer – it’s easy to feel that we’re not getting told the whole story.

That’s where newspapers come in. It’s their job – whether it’s the Daily Globe or a small community weekly – to be a trusted, objective source of information. It’s their job to keep a measure of the pulse of their coverage areas – reporting the successes, the failures and, yes, the stories that some are sometimes too eager to hide.

The aforementioned survey, which included 1,012 adults, was commissioned by the American Society of Newspaper Editors for Sunshine Week, a national initiative that encourages discussions about the importance of freedom of information. We at the Globe aim to do our part to continuously spark this discussion, for the benefit of our readers and the
communities we serve.

The Back Pages is a recurring roundup of editorial opinions on issues that face Minnesota.