Happy 21st Birthday, HPR

The little newspaper that could turns 21 with this edition of HPR. We are proud as all get out and hope you bear with us as we reminisce and acknowledge.

The High Plains Reader no doubt has had a storied past. Good and bad. It’s never been easy, but whoever said building a business from scratch is easy? We’ve had our moments where we hit the ball out of the park and others where we fell flat on our face. Mostly, though, we went through the motions, the ups and the downs, and we grew up, one week at a time.

The Reader began as a black-and-white, 16-page bi-weekly in Grand Forks. The first issue was Sept. 8, 1994. The cover image was a Misha Gordin silver gelatin print entitled “Shout.” It was a disturbing graphic of a hand covering a mouth. The sidebar headline read: “Tent revivals, porn queens, photographing dreams, Naked, Woody and Juliette, Culinary Decadence and Martin Zellar.”

The masthead on page 3, the editorial page as well, listed Peter Ryan as Publisher, Ian Swanson as Editor, and Mark Boswell as Managing Editor. Contributing writers included Irene Bluemle, Jennifer Merrill, Craig Kalenze and Christopher Jacobs. Brenda Riskey was named for Photos; Jason Bindas and Len Schmid for Art.

Editor Ian Swanson’s first HPR editorial lamented, while noting life’s little pleasures sometimes unavailable in a small town, the absence of a “publication which both chronicles and informs people about what is happening under the surface of the community, something which takes an in-depth, colorful look at an issue… At the same time, we hope it can serve as a vehicle which rewards area writers, photographers and artists for their work.”

Swanson’s first editorial was auspicious. “Ambitious goals for a tabloid with a tiny budget and a strapped staff of servers and students, plus no corporate support of which to speak.”

Interestingly, the basic and foresightful design and layout created by the Boswell and Schmid team continues today. They breathed life into a visual concept that continued and evolved now for 21 plus years. The High Plains Reader name, as the story goes, was the brainchild of another founder, Jim Johnson, while talking over beer at Whitey’s in East Grand Forks about creating such a publication as this.

Fast forward to 2015. It’s important to look back to the beginning to get a sense of HPR’s two decades plus of existence. That first edition set the tone for decades to some, even though ownership changed a little more than two years later. The approach to content and especially the design format continue today. What nobody expected was the flood of 1997, which devastated Grand Forks and intimately displaced HPR to Fargo.

Since then, and over time, the High Plains Reader soon embarked on a weekly publishing schedule, and grew from black-and-white to two-color to four-color and eventually to full-processed color on every page.

The Reader has become an anchor in the Fargo, Moorhead, West Fargo community. We distribute nearly 12,000 papers each and every week, distinguishing HPR as the fifth highest circulation newspaper in North Dakota. There are too many people to thank over the years, but please know, HPR is what it is because of the countless talented people who’ve put their hearts into it and who’ve often contributed unconditionally.

Raul Gomez, publisher, and this writer –HPR’s co-owners -- genuinely acknowledge our staff, volunteers, delivery people, ad sales reps, our 25,000 or so weekly readers, our printers, and our business partners.

Fittingly, and in closing, we again quote Ian Swanson’s first-ever High Plains Reader editorial: “We also acknowledge our advertisers, who put their trust in something new and different. We urge our readers to support them with their shopping… Change has always been slow in North Dakota, a state sometimes hostile to new ideas. But we think this is a change in the environment for the better.”