Meeting Digital Challenges
of Community Journalism
JOU 499-401, Online Community News Site
Spring 2014
Based on Saving Community Journalism, by Penelope Muse Abernathy
Instructor: Al Cross, Director of the Institute for Rural Journalism
and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky
Newspapers differ from most other businesses
• BUSINESS MODEL: Newspapers get a small share of revenue from
selling a product directly to customers, not enough to cover the cost
of producing the product; instead, they sell access to customers,
through advertising
• HISTORIC MISSION: Informing and educating the public, a service
necessary for the proper functioning of democracy, and enshrined in
the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The only profession
mentioned in the Constitution, other than law and government
positions, is “the press.”
WHY? To act as a watchdog on government and help citizens cast
informed votes, making democracy work.
Newspapers differ from most other businesses
• WATCHDOG FUNCTION: Alex Jones of Harvard, who went from a
small-town newspaper family in East Tennessee to The New York
Times, estimates that 85 percent of the enterprise journalism that
causes major changes in public policy comes from newspapers
• ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM: Two main types: Beat reporting,
including meetings of public agencies, which are a window to see
issues; and investigative and interpretive reporting on “quality of life
issues,” from government corruption to environment to health
• SMALL PAPERS CAN DO BIG THINGS: Some small, rural papers have
won Pulitzer Prizes and other awards for being strong watchdogs
Newspapers are undergoing creative destruction
• Newspaper advertising revenue has fallen to the level of 1950, mainly
from loss of classifieds to Craigslist and other online outlets, and
stock prices of newspaper companies are 1/5 the level of 2006
• Major metropolitan newspapers have cut back on circulation and
news coverage in areas beyond their metropolitan areas, putting
more responsibility on smaller newspapers to be local watchdogs
• That’s one reason the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community
Issues was created, to help rural journalists define the public agenda
in their communities, through strong reporting and commentary –
especially on issues that affect the community but come at it from
afar and have few reliable, local sources (example: the coalfields)
Newspapers’ community functions in the digital era
• Agenda setting is more important in the digital age, when people
have so many sources of information they are overloaded; when a
newspaper uncovers facts and takes a stand, it can influence policy
• Newspapers can also encourage community growth and commerce;
in the digital era, they must look for new ways to do it; some get into
the website construction business
• They can also foster a sense of geographic community, including
commonalities with nearby communities citizens may not think of as
their own; this can also help a newspaper maintain or even expand its
market
What makes a newspaper a community paper?
• AUDIENCE, traditionally measured by print circulation
Upper limit has been defined as low as 15,000, as high as 50,000
Your instructor thinks 30,000 is about right
• CONTENT: If a newspaper emphasizes local news and treats state,
national and international news as secondary, it’s a community paper
• A NEW DEFINITION: The author of your reading says many papers in
small and medium-sized markets position themselves as community
papers; they do that mainly through CONTENT, but many have shrunk
their AUDIENCE to the metro and nearby areas; she wants to set the
circulation at 100,000 or higher, excluding only the 90 or so largest
regional and national dailies, and sees similar strategies for such papers
Building vibrant community on many platforms
• Almost all newspapers exist to provide local news, which is what
readers say they want; but what is “local?”
• Different strokes for different folks: The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer
gets much traffic with a Fort Bragg site; the Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press
Democrat has 11 special-interest sites (examples: entertainment,
business, high-school sports, pro football, parenting, civic affairs);
these are communities of interest, not geography
• But papers still need to nurture geographic identity, so they must give
context, explaining to readers why they should care about a subject
that might sound like “boring government stuff”
Building vibrant community on many platforms
• Building community across platforms is connected to the other two
strategies your author recommends: developing new revenue from the
digital product and “shedding legacy costs” (biggest example: producing
the print product in some other paper’s pressroom, so you can lay off
your own pressroom staff; this is becoming very common)
• Don’t just build traffic, build loyalty, which sustains your audience and
makes them more engaged with your product and its advertising – thus
making your advertising more effective
• Loyalty can be print-only, digital-only, or combined; those who read both
forms tend to be the most loyal; digital-only (youngest) are least loyal
Building vibrant community on many platforms
• Geographic community often involves sub-communities; data on such
places (by ZIP code, census tract and census block) is more available than
ever, and can give the newspaper connections with sub-communities in
its market
• Editors must also realize that their readers are part of larger
communities – a region, the state, a multi-state region and the nation,
and that most readers of community newspapers do not read a
newspaper from elsewhere, and that they need to place their
communities in those contexts: how do they compare with others? Data
can be very useful for this, too
Building vibrant community on many platforms
• Social media are essential; even non-daily newspapers like The Woodford
Sun that don’t put news online have Facebook pages for important
updates between editions, and are beginning to use Twitter for that
• Mobile access is key; not only do most Americans get online information
from mobile devices, many rural communities have become bedroom
communities with long commuting times to jobs; in Lee and Estill
counties, the longer the commute, the less likely workers were to read
the local newspaper (Institute for Rural Journalism study)
• Special applications can appeal to communities of interest, giving people
in-depth detail on subjects that are important to them (more on this
later)
Building vibrant community on many platforms
• Consumers have a “reference price” for things, what they think it is
worth to them, and newspapers have set that too low – typically, 50
cents a copy (many now charge a dollar for daily or weekly editions)
• Newspapers gave people information for free, thinking/hoping they’d
figure out the Internet, but that hasn’t worked
• Newspapers finally figured out that if they charged nothing for their
product online, that made consumers think it wasn’t worth much,
depressing their reference price
• Some liked the per-story model (a la iTunes), but now the most common
revenue approach is a metered pay wall for non-subscribers; some
papers charge print subscribers a little extra for online access
Building vibrant community on many platforms
• It’s important to make exceptions to pay walls: breaking news,
obituaries, opinion pieces; otherwise, you are cutting people off from
the sort of material that creates a community
• Pay walls collect readers’ email addresses, which the paper can use in
advertising and marketing
• But there is also promise in value-based pricing, based on the value
delivered to a specific group; extra fees for specialized information
• Whiteville (N.C.) News Reporter: Sports of all Sorts, Curious Citizens,
Plugged-in Parents, Front Porch Neighbors (mostly older, longtime
residents), Texting Teens, Home for the Holidays (expatriates) – but only
the first one has been done, illustrating the difficulty of doing new things