Members
Looking for a member of IFPA?
Search the IFPA database below
Perhaps the most valuable benefit IFPA membership offers y...
click for more
|
| |
| | Member Profile: Rick Anderson, The Midweek, Inc., Fergus Falls, MN, March 2008 |  | |
RICK ANDERSON
THE MIDWEEK, INC., FERGUS FALLS, MN
BY DWIGHT BITIKOFER
Fergus Falls, pop. 12,400, is on I-94 in west central Minnesota, about an hour southeast of Fargo, N.D. It is in Otter Tail County, a place that claims a thousand of the 10,000 lakes touted on Minnesota license plates.
The town celebrated its annual Frostbite Festival in February. Recreation, agriculture and light industry drive the town's economy. On the horizon is conversion of an outdated, architectural gem of a state hospital campus into an international cultural college.
Rick Anderson has been at the helm of The Midweek, Inc. since he purchased the fledgling company in 1980. Prior to that time, the Fergus Falls paper had been an outpost of sorts for the larger Midweek Publications in West Fargo, N.D.
Anderson had been a successful, young TV ad sales person and a protege of a television ad manager who subsequently pushed him out of that nest. After a frustrating stint as a floor covering sales rep, he found his way to Midweek Publications and from there to Fergus Falls.
Anderson was 26 years old when he purchased The Midweek in Fergus Falls. He and his wife had a year-and-a-half-old son in the summer of 1980 when they moved from their hometown of Moorhead, Minn. Interest rates were nearing 20 percent, and the daily paper in Fergus Falls was counting on him to fail.
Now, 28 years later, Midweek, Inc. publishes four papers - none of them in the middle of the week. "Once I was calling on Kmart in Chicago," said Anderson. "I was sitting down w...
click for more
|
| |
|
