This week I am spending time talking about newspapers with a whole lot of newspaper people.

Oh sure, we might talk about the cold weather a little, or about the Minnesota Vikings or Twins or other sports, and maybe even a little bit about our personal lives.

But, the majority of the time at the Minnesota Newspaper Association’s Annual Convention is spent talking about newspapers – I know, not a real shocker.

The topics range from use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) to legal issues, from page design to web design, from postal issues to readership numbers.

And, just about everything in between.

This year being an election year, and with state and national politics heating up higher than usual, that, too, is a big topic of conversation.

Most medium to small newspapers try to stay as neutral as possible. We want to try and be accurate, and present the facts as they are.

So many people, however, are taking sides on every issue, and are doing it with or without any facts with it. And that is true on both sides.

It has been pretty hard to watch.

If you are a newspaper editor, you get lots and lots of emails from both sides of an issue. Most come from something that sounds like a news source, but it does not take very long to figure out that it is from one side or the other.

For most folks, it is Facebook or X or some other social media that they are bombarded with. As I have stated before, it is very easy to post whatever you want, and blast away as much as you want.

These days it seems, you are either one way or the other in your beliefs, and there is no listening to the other side’s opinions. And, both sides have decided the other side is the devil incarnate.

No wonder Congress can’t get much done.

Newspapers often get caught in the middle, despite trying hard to stay as neutral as they can. But a column or letter on one of these hot topics, not written by any staff member of the newspaper, sometimes convinces people that the paper and its staff are too liberal or too conservative.

It is interesting that we occasionally get accused of being one or the other, sometimes just days apart. And it was interesting that someone just mentioned the other day at the Blue Earth Chamber Banquet that they had a hard time pegging me as a Democrat or Republican, after having read my column over the years.

That is a good thing. And the answer is, I guess it depends. I look more at individual issues and decide how I feel about them. And I look at individual candidates and decide on them by guessing which one will do the most good for me and my community, and which ones would do the most harm.

This year, 2026, is an election year, and it is already gearing up to be a doozie when it comes to vitriolic rhetoric. And it is not even a presidential election year.

The year is kicking off with the party caucuses this Tuesday, Feb. 3. The locations of the party caucuses are located in advertisements elsewhere in this issue of the Register.

It also seems to be the kickoff of letters to the editor season.

You will see several letters elsewhere in this issue, some of which have to do with politics.

We do edit every letter we receive. We edit them for spelling and grammar, for possible libelous statements, for unsubstantiated information, for untrue statements, for “naughty” words, and for other things.

We also edit them if they are something that needs to be in an advertisement. That includes if they are just an endorsement of a candidate, for instance. We charge for those endorsement letters and consider them political advertising.

We try not to edit letters for content or for opinions. The whole idea is to give people a chance to express their opinions. In a decent way. They can do it on Facebook if they want to do it their own way.

People saying that we only accept letters from one political persuasion or the other, are incorrect. We try to present both views, if we are sent a letter to the editor from either side of the aisle.

One more thing.

Letters to the editor must be signed by the writer and include the town/city of residence. The letter cannot be signed just by a group name, like “Citizens Concerned With Change,” or something like that. A person’s name has to be added, or a list of names needs to be there.