MANKATO, Minn. (AP) -- Alfred Lahti of North Mankato grew up reading a newspaper. It's just the way he was raised. To stay connected to the community meant keeping up with local government, crime, sports, etc. If it's in the paper, Lahti read it.

But eventually, time got the better of Lahti's eyesight. And it became difficult for him to read without a magnifier. But reading that way just wasn't the same.

"What I could visually cover in five minutes before would take me 15 minutes with a magnifier," he said.

Along came the State Services for the Blind's Radio Talking Book program and its newspaper component. For one hour each day volunteers around the state broadcast their reading of the a local newspaper. In these parts, the dispatches read come from the paper you're reading now.

"The thing is, I've always been a good paper reader, I always got the paper when I was sighted," Lahti said.

Lahti is one of about 200 people in the Mankato area who own a special, state-issued radio that broadcasts content for the sight-impaired. Content has been broadcast for decades, but the reading of the local newspaper is just now coming up on its 10-year anniversary.

The local group that coordinates it is a big one: About 40 volunteers make sure every day of every month is covered. The broadcast airs daily at 7 p.m. and typically runs about an hour. News, sports and entertainment -- everything in the paper that concerns local events -- is read.

Some content is tougher than others to get through. A Dr. Gott column, for instance, which may be full of scientific and medical terms, is sometimes harder than a simple sports report from the previous night's game.

Readers work out of a small room at the CCTV public access studios. Wearing a headset and holding that day's copy of The Free Press, they simply read as clearly as possible as many articles as they can get to.

"We want to do something for people," said Mark Dickey, who has both volunteered for and coordinated the program. "And it's only one night per month. It's not a real big hassle."

Dickey said he attended an event at an area assisted-living facility recently where residents said the program relieves them of the burden of having to ask someone else to read the newspaper to them.

"This really keeps them going," Dickey said.

Stuart Holland, who administers the state's Radio Talking Book program, said the local newspaper readers are vital to their mission.

The number of people using the service, he said, is dwarfed by the number of people who could be using it. The program only penetrates about 15 percent of the sight-impaired population. And that population, he said, is only going to grow as baby boomers continue to age.

Science, however, is getting better, and breakthroughs in curing blindness could counter some of the growth the boomer generation brings to the number of those who are sight-impaired.

For now, though, Holland says the newspaper program is a valuable one.

"It does give them a connection to a community that they didn't have," he said.

Lahti likes having that connection. But that doesn't mean he doesn't critique the readers.

"Most of the time the readers will read an article all the way," he said. "Some of the fellows like to read the sports articles. They get down to the part where they got so many kills, so many aces and the coach says, 'We played a good game.' Well, that really is not part of the situation, you know."

"Generally speaking the articles the readers cover are good. Sometime when you got three shootings and two automobile accidents in a 24-hour period, and then a city council meeting and a fire -- it's hard to cover all those items, and the readers make their selections."

His critique on Mayor John Brady's DWI situation: "I think it was a little overplayed," he said.

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