In May 1920, the Spanish flu reached Fairbanks and infected most of the newspaper staff. "We had to keep writing of flu and the typesetters kept setting flu stories until they began to imagine they had the flu and went—one, two, three—just like that," said Thompson in a story on the outbreak. Two years later, Thompson and the "News-Miner" strongly protested the city's order to evict the prostitutes living in a regulated district within Fairbanks. On September 24, 1922, Thompson reported that the "News-Miner's" press had been sabotaged, oil had been mixed with the paper's printing ink, and a fire had been set in its office, presumably as a result of the paper's stance against eviction.