FARGO (AP) - National Geographic editor Chris Johns says he's been to North Dakota many times and an article titled "The Emptied Prairie" was not intended as a profile of the state.

Johns said the story, published this month, has its roots in his experience of driving through North Dakota as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.

"Why did we focus on North Dakota? Because there are some trends there that spoke to us and I love North Dakota," he said.

The article created an uproar in the state, with residents saying it unfairly portrayed North Dakota as a state of ghost towns.

State Commerce Commissioner Shane Goettle said his search of the Internet turned up more than twice as many abandoned communities in Arizona as in North Dakota. Gov. John Hoeven fired off a letter to National Geographic, saying the story was "way off the mark" and that the magazine should return and cover the state's growing economy, low crime and clean environment.

National Geographic spokeswoman Beth Foster said the story was not supposed to be about all of North Dakota but rather "a specific look at a phenomenon in the North American landscape, and that's the abandoned rural farm towns."

Historian Clay Jenkinson, a scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University who portrays Thomas Jefferson on a weekly radio show, said the story is old.

"Someone is always coming out here and discovering that the plains are emptying out," he said. "This is yet another in a long, long series of dying town stories, and we all need to take a deep breath."