How to Read Reporter & Farmer Content and What Subscribing Includes

Updated

Reporter & Farmer is a local news site for Day County, South Dakota, and its surrounding communities. You can read headlines, photos, and story leads for free, but most full articles are marked Exclusive Subscriber Content and require a subscription to open. If you only need to know what's happening in the area, the public homepage gives you that at a glance; if you want the complete stories, you'll need to subscribe.

What you can read without subscribing

The homepage surfaces enough to follow local news at a headline level:

  • Article titles and publication dates
  • Lead photos with captions and photo credits
  • The opening sentence or two of each story
  • Section labels such as News and Advertisement

Recent examples from the site show this pattern clearly. A football recap, "First win of the season for Bearcats football," appears with a photo of Hudson Lesnar catching an interception, credited to Connor Handrahan, and a one-line summary before the subscriber gate. The same applies to "Waubay blasts into homecoming week," which lists homecoming king and queen candidates by name in the visible portion.

What "Exclusive Subscriber Content" means

Nearly every full story on the page carries the Exclusive Subscriber Content tag. That label is the signal that the article body is behind the subscription wall. In the sample content, this tag appears on:

Story Topic Reporter
First win of the season for Bearcats football Local sports Connor Handrahan
Lifetime in show ring prepares Larson for statewide 4-H leadership Community / youth Timothy Gibson
Waubay blasts into homecoming week School news Connor Handrahan
Roerig retires after half a century of service Local business / people Timothy Gibson
Get into the fall spirit with 27th annual Pumpkin Fest Community events Connor Handrahan
Gone antiquing Column / humor Jerry Nelson

One item, "Waubay blasts into homecoming week," is additionally labeled Subscriber snapshot, suggesting some subscriber content is presented in a shorter snapshot format.

Topics and communities covered

Based on the published stories, Reporter & Farmer's coverage centers on:

  • Local sports — Webster Area Bearcats football and homecoming games
  • Schools — Waubay School District homecoming week and student candidates
  • Youth and 4-H — Day County Fair sheep show, state 4-H ambassadors
  • Local business and people — retirements such as Ken Roerig's 50 years at Roerig Insurance
  • Community events — the 27th annual Pumpkin Fest and other fall celebrations
  • Columns — personal essays like "Gone antiquing" by Jerry Nelson
  • Local institutions — the Webster Theatre, which has served the community since the 1950s under owners Shawn and Dawn Rithmiller

The communities named in the content are Webster, Waubay, and Day County more broadly, all in South Dakota.

How to find a specific story or topic

  1. Start on the homepage and scan the headlines, which are grouped by recency.
  2. Use the section labels (for example, News) to narrow the type of story.
  3. Match the reporter's byline — Connor Handrahan and Timothy Gibson appear most often — if you're following a particular writer.
  4. Click a headline to open the article page; if it carries the Exclusive Subscriber Content tag, you'll hit the subscription prompt before the full text.

Subscribing

The site shows a subscribe signal, and subscriber-only articles display a subscription prompt in place of the full story. The specific price, plan options, and payment methods are not stated in the available page content, so check the subscription link on the site itself for current terms. What is clear from the page is the trade-off: free access gives you headlines, photos, and leads; a subscription unlocks the complete local reporting listed above.