Park Bugle
Overview
The Park Bugle is a monthly nonprofit community newspaper published in St. Paul, Minnesota. Its first issue appeared in July 1974, and it has served the St. Anthony Park neighborhood of St. Paul and the neighboring communities of Lauderdale, Falcon Heights and Como Park ever since. It is published by Park Press Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, and it is delivered free to households and businesses in its communities, with donations, advertising and subscriptions from outside the delivery area helping to defray its publishing and distribution costs. Its website is parkbugle.org, and its mailing address is P.O. Box 8126, St. Paul, Minnesota 55108.
The Bugle describes its purpose in the masthead printed in every issue: it covers community news and promotes the exchange of ideas and opinions in its communities, strives to promote freedom of expression, enhances the quality of life in its readership communities and encourages community participation. Its organizational mission, stated in its fundraising materials, is to strengthen the community by providing local news and stories that transform readers into neighbors.
The Communities It Serves
St. Anthony Park, known to residents as SAP, is a St. Paul neighborhood on the western edge of the city, adjacent to the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus, bordering Minneapolis to the west and the Minnesota State Fairgrounds to the east. Laid out in the late 1800s, it was home to three Minnesota governors and retains a small-town feel within the city, with a business district of independently owned shops and restaurants around Como Avenue, a Carnegie library and St. Anthony Park Elementary School as focal points, and two colleges in or beside it — the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus and Luther Seminary.
Around SAP, the Bugle's territory takes in three distinct adjoining communities. Como Park is the St. Paul district around Lake Como and the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory. Falcon Heights is a small independent suburb that hosts the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus facilities and the State Fairgrounds, and Lauderdale is a small residential city enclosed between St. Paul and Minneapolis. Together they form a coherent corner of the Twin Cities — village-scaled, university-influenced, and historically organized around neighborhood institutions — and the Bugle is the one newspaper written specifically for that corner. Its coverage regularly includes the District 10 and District 12 community councils, Como Park High School, Murray Middle School and St. Anthony Park Elementary.
Founded in 1974
Exactly fifty years after its founding, the Bugle marked the anniversary in its July 2024 issue: the first issue of the Park Bugle was published in July 1974. The paper's own retrospectives acknowledge that its gestation has not been fully documented, but the outlines are clear — community leaders in St. Anthony Park wanted a way to share news, announce events and record the actions of the civic, educational and religious organizations of the neighborhood, and a monthly community newspaper was the instrument they created.
The founding coincided with a wider St. Paul movement. The Twin Cities developed what is believed to be the largest group of urban neighborhood newspapers in the country, and the neighborhood press organized in the mid-1970s; St. Paul's neighborhood papers became a durable feature of the city's civic life. The Bugle, begun in that moment, outlasted nearly all of its peers.
A Nonprofit, Community-Supported Model
The Bugle's structure distinguishes it from almost every other paper in this directory. It is not owned by a family or a media company; it is a nonprofit corporation governed by a board of directors, historically organized as Park Press Inc. It arrives free in the mailboxes of its neighborhoods — a 2010 account put its circulation at 14,000, delivered free to more than 11,000 households as well as businesses in St. Anthony Park, Como Park, Lauderdale and Falcon Heights — and it asks its readers to pay voluntarily. Its annual fundraising appeals seek tens of thousands of dollars a year from individual donors and businesses; its GiveMN profile asks readers to raise $50,000 in a year to defray operating costs, and notes that the paper relies on tax-deductible donations like most nonprofits.
Subscriptions are sold, at $30 for one year in recent issues, to readers outside the free-delivery area. Advertising from the neighborhood's independent businesses fills the rest of the budget — and, as former editors have recalled, the number of advertising inches in an issue historically determined the number of editorial inches available, a direct link between local commerce and local news.
Editors and the Paper's Voice
The Bugle's editorship has been a neighborhood institution in itself. Dave Healy served ten years as editor — the longest-serving editor in the paper's history to that point — before retiring in 2010, when Kristal Leebrick, a St. Anthony Park resident and veteran journalist who had worked for the Forum in Fargo, the Wadena Pioneer Journal and the New Brighton Focus, took over as managing editor on an interim basis and continued in the role. Mollie Hoben, who joined the Bugle in 1980 as a volunteer writer and served as editor for two and a half years when there were very few women journalists, learned community journalism at the Bugle before founding the Minnesota Women's Press; she has credited the Bugle with teaching her that a community newspaper can affect people's lives. Mary Mergenthal served as editor during the 1990s and into 2001, and remains associated with the paper as its obituaries editor.
The current managing editor is Scott Carlson, a veteran Twin Cities journalist who has held the job for more than five years, writing a regular editor's column as well as reporting. One of the stories former editors remember most is the tornado that struck St. Anthony Park in 1984: the Bugle's staff photographed the damage across the neighborhood and produced a special edition in three days — an early demonstration that a monthly could act like a news organization when its community needed one.
What the Bugle Publishes
Each monthly issue, typically sixteen to twenty pages, mixes straight community reporting with features, commentary, letters, an events calendar, school news, business news, arts coverage and obituaries. Recurring subjects in recent issues include community council land-use decisions, the University of Minnesota's presence in Falcon Heights, Como Park Zoo and conservatory news, local school programs, neighborhood history features, the Chroma Zone mural festival in the south St. Anthony Park creative district, housing and homelessness, and the doings of the area's churches, library and senior programs.
The Bugle's history features are a signature. Working with the St. Anthony Park history community, the paper has published long retrospective series on the neighborhood's development, its boosters and its overlooked residents, drawn from the Minnesota Historical Society's collections — journalism that doubles as the neighborhood's written memory.
Production and Change
The paper's production history mirrors the industry's. In the 1980s the Bugle switched to computer layout: instead of carrying typed articles to another neighborhood paper's office for typesetting, staff learned QuarkXPress and produced the paper in-house. Its modern issues are published simultaneously as print and as full-issue PDFs on parkbugle.org, with stories also posted individually to the website. Publication dates and deadlines are printed in each issue, with delivery taking several business days after publication and bulk drop-offs completed within days.
The Bugle calls itself, in its masthead and appeals, an award-winning newspaper, and it competes in the Minnesota Newspaper Association's contests, where its columnists and features have been entered and honored. Its fiftieth-anniversary issues in 2024, including a special September edition, gathered reminiscences from former editors and readers — a community taking stock of its own newspaper.
Why a Monthly Survived
Most American neighborhood newspapers of the 1970s are gone. The Bugle's survival has structural explanations its own history makes visible: a nonprofit owner that cannot be sold; free universal delivery in a compact, literate, university-adjacent territory; readers who donate as well as advertise; and an editorial mission — connection between neighbors — that a monthly can fulfil better than a daily news cycle. Its stated values emphasize community connection, inclusivity and diverse voices, objective reporting, and honoring its history while embracing its future, including a digital presence alongside print.
Place in Minnesota Journalism
The Park Bugle, monthly since July 1974, nonprofit, free to its neighborhoods and supported by the readers it serves, is one of the most durable community newspapers in the Twin Cities. It is neither a suburban weekly nor a city daily; it is a neighborhood paper in the specific St. Paul tradition, covering four communities — St. Anthony Park, Como Park, Falcon Heights and Lauderdale — at the scale at which their residents actually live. Fifty years after its first issue, it remains what its founders intended: the printed conversation of a neighborhood with itself.
