Prairie Pioneer
The Prairie Pioneer is a weekly newspaper published in Pollock, in Campbell County in northern South Dakota, serving Pollock and the surrounding farm and ranch country along the Missouri River near the North Dakota line. It is published under the NorDak Publishing umbrella of independent publisher J. Louis Mullen, whose South Dakota papers also include the Mobridge Tribune, the West River Eagle and the Potter County News, and whose North Dakota papers include the Emmons County Record just across the state line in Linton. The Pioneer was formed by combining Campbell County's struggling newspapers in the late 1970s under editor Larry Atkinson, was owned for more than three decades by Allan and Leah Burke, and was sold to Mullen on July 1, 2020. Its office is on Main Street in Pollock, and it remains the only newspaper published in Campbell County.
Pollock and Campbell County
Pollock is a small town of a few hundred residents near Lake Oahe on the Missouri River. A tribute entered in the Congressional Record for the town's 50th anniversary in 2005 described a community of about 300 proud residents, supported by tourist facilities serving the lake, including parks, campgrounds, a beach and boat ramps, and by the DairiConcepts cheese plant, which began in 1960 as the Dakota Cheese Company and grew into the town's leading employer, producing tens of thousands of pounds of mozzarella daily by the time of the anniversary. The Soo Line railroad branch from Ashley, North Dakota, to Pollock was abandoned in 1987 and the track removed the following year, leaving the town dependent on highways. The Pioneer's territory is this northern Campbell County world of wheat and cattle farms, small schools, lake recreation and a county whose other newspaper ventures had failed before the Pioneer consolidated them.
Predecessor: The Pollock Pioneer of 1956
Pollock itself is a young town by South Dakota standards, founded in the 1950s when the original townsite was relocated ahead of the flooding of the Missouri River valley behind the Oahe Dam. According to the Congressional Record's anniversary history, E. L. MacKay founded the Pollock Pioneer in 1956 as the town's first newspaper, recording the growth of the new community from its beginning. MacKay is credited in that account with coining Pollock's motto about a city built on a hill, which he used as a byline for an article, a phrase still associated with the town. Volunteers planted some 15,000 trees in Pollock in 1956, the same founding season, and the Pioneer documented the building of a town from raw prairie, including the cheese plant's first day of production in 1960, when it turned out 1,350 pounds of cheddar.
Larry Atkinson and the Creation of the Prairie Pioneer
The modern paper dates from the rescue of Campbell County journalism by Larry Atkinson, whose biography is preserved in the South Dakota Newspaper Association's Hall of Fame records. Atkinson, a Pollock native who began in newspapers at age 12 delivering the Aberdeen American News and Grit Magazine in his hometown, graduated from South Dakota State University in 1973 with a journalism degree, served in the Air Force, and earned a master's degree from Ball State University in 1978. Returning home after his discharge, he found Campbell County's newspapers struggling to survive, and he helped combine them into a single paper, the Prairie Pioneer. His work drew the attention of Gene Chamberlin of the Mobridge Tribune, who offered him the chance to buy into the larger Mobridge operation, beginning Atkinson's long association with the newspaper group that would own the Pioneer for decades. Atkinson went on to become one of South Dakota's best-known weekly publishers, honored in 2012 with the Cervi Award of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors for his editorial writing, even as the Pioneer he created continued under other owners.
The Burke Years, 1987 to 2020
On October 1, 1987, Allan and Leah Burke purchased the Prairie Pioneer. Both Burkes had journalism backgrounds, and they ran the paper, along with the Emmons County Record in Linton, North Dakota, which they bought on October 1, 1993, as a two-state, two-paper operation from Pollock. State ownership filings from their tenure show the Pioneer publishing 52 issues a year from 117 Main Street, Post Office Box 218, Pollock, with a total press run of about 1,825 copies and paid circulation of roughly 1,650, most of it by mail subscription, figures that demonstrate how far a Campbell County weekly's readership extends beyond its small home county through the mail. The Burkes described themselves, when they finally sold, as caretakers of newspapers that had been around for generations, and they held the Pioneer for nearly 33 years, one of the longest ownership tenures in modern South Dakota weekly journalism.
Sale to J. Louis Mullen in 2020
The Burkes sold the Prairie Pioneer and the Emmons County Record to J. Louis Mullen, with the purchase taking effect July 1, 2020, in a transaction represented by Julie Bergman of Grimes, McGovern and Associates and reported by Editor and Publisher. After more than three decades, the Burkes said, it was time to enjoy retirement and to pass the baton, and they expressed confidence that Mullen's organization would provide a good future for both papers. Mullen, who lives in Buffalo, Wyoming, grew up in the newspaper industry, starting as a paperboy for the Sioux City Journal at age four and working in nearly every newspaper job from janitor to reporter to publisher. His NorDak Publishing holdings grew to include weeklies in North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan, Oregon and Washington, and in South Dakota his group came to include the Mobridge Tribune, the West River Eagle at Eagle Butte and the Potter County News at Gettysburg, purchased from the Atkinson family interests, alongside the Pioneer.
Coverage and Community Role
The Pioneer's subject matter is Campbell County life: Pollock city business, Campbell County Commission proceedings, school news and sports from the Pollock and Herreid area schools, farm and ranch reporting, fishing and recreation news from Lake Oahe, church and club activities, obituaries and legal notices. As the county's only newspaper, it is the legal publication for local governments and the printed memory of a town that is itself younger than many of its readers. Its pages have carried everything from cheese plant expansion to the loss of the railroad, and its subscription base, historically an order of magnitude larger than Pollock's population, reflects the farm families spread across Campbell County and the former residents who follow the town from across the country.
Operations and Legal Status
South Dakota law requires legal newspapers to file ownership and circulation statements with the Secretary of State, and the Pioneer's filings provide a public record of its operation across decades, from the Burke-era statements of 2001 to filings in the 2020s under the Mullen organization, with the paper's office given at 110 Main Street in Pollock and publishing functions coordinated through Mobridge, the group's South Dakota hub on Grand Crossing. The filings confirm the essential facts of the business: a weekly frequency, 52 issues a year, subscription pricing tiered for the local trade territory, elsewhere in state and out of state, and a circulation built overwhelmingly on paid mail subscriptions rather than newsstand sales, the standard model for a county weekly in ranch country.
Place in Northern South Dakota Journalism
The Prairie Pioneer sits in a notable lineage. Its founder-generation includes E. L. MacKay, who gave a brand-new dam-relocation town its first paper in 1956; Larry Atkinson, who rebuilt county journalism by consolidation and became a nationally honored editorial writer; the Burkes, who stewarded the paper for over three decades; and J. Louis Mullen, part of a younger generation of independent owners buying rural weeklies to keep them locally focused. The paper's survival, in a county of only a few thousand people and a town of a few hundred, is the practical result of those successive rescues. For Pollock and Campbell County, the Pioneer remains what its predecessors were in 1956 and in the late 1970s: the single printed record of a Missouri River community, published weekly on Main Street.
