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When a young Norwegian tourist is found murdered in the forest of Lake Superior’s north shore in Vidar Sunstøl’s “The Land of Dreams,” one character asks, “Who would want to murder a Norwegian?” The haunting rugged country of the Arrowhead region is the true protagonist and most finely rendered character in this first volume of the mystery writer’s Minnesota Trilogy. In “The Land of Dreams,” the aboriginal Ojibwe, the descendants of Scandinavian settlers, foreign tourists and a Norwegian policeman discover their place and their true allegiances in the aftermath of the murder. And while the crime is apparently solved – one way for the police and another for the reader – the mystery of motive and modality and the connection of the present murder with a century-old disappearance remain.
We lost 15 percent of our traffic overnight.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.
We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.
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