When a newspaper chain lets a community's small daily newspaper deteriorate

From The Rural Blog

All across America, small newspapers are shriveling, mainly because digital media have taken much of their advertising base. Quantifying that on a national scale would be very difficult; the U.S. has more than 6,000 newspapers, most of them small. But a story about one, The Hawk Eye of Burlington, Iowa, is emblematic of the problem, which is worst for small daily papers bearing a burden of debt incurred by hedge-fund buyers like GateHouse Media, which took over Gannett Co. and its name.

Elaine Godfrey, who grew up near the Mississippi River town of 24,000, writes for The Atlantic about The Hawk Eye under the new Gannett: "Its staff, now down to three overstretched news reporters, still produces a print edition six days a week. But the paper is dying. Its pages are smaller than they used to be, and there are fewer of them. Even so, wide margins and large fonts are used to fill space. The paper is laid out by a remote design team and printed 100 miles away in Peoria, Illinois; if a reader doesn’t get her paper in the morning, she is instructed to dial a number that will connect her to a call center in the Philippines. Obituaries used to be free; now, when your uncle dies, you have to pay to publish a write-up. These days, most of The Hawk Eye’s articles are ripped from other Gannett-owned Iowa publications, such as The Des Moines Register and the Ames Tribune, written for a readership three hours away. The opinion section, once an arena for local columnists and letter writers to spar over the merits and morals of riverboat gambling and railroad jobs moving to Topeka, is dominated by syndicated national columnists."

Using the recently created Burlington Breaking News Facebook page to solicit comments, Godfrey got dozens: "Readers noticed the paper’s sloppiness first—how there seemed to be twice as many typos as before, and how sometimes the articles would end mid-sentence instead of continuing after the jump. The newspaper’s remaining reporters are overworked; there are local stories they’d like to tell but don’t have the bandwidth to cover. The Hawk Eye’s current staff is facing the impossible task of keeping a historic newspaper alive while its owner is attempting to squeeze it dry."

Social-media sites that pop up when a newspaper withers "can be a useful resource, and a good source of community jokes and gossip. But speculation and rumor run rampant" on the Facebook page, Godfrey writes. "When a member hears something that sounds like gunshots nearby, she’ll post about it, and others will offer theories about the source. Once, I read a thread about an elementary-school principal suddenly skipping town. Some thought he might have behaved inappropriately with a student; one person said he’d been involved with a student’s mother; another swore they’d seen security-camera footage of the principal slashing tires in a parking lot at night. I checked The Hawk Eye and other outlets, but I couldn’t find verification of any of those stories."

The guessing is hard for Dale Alison, former Hawk Eye editor, to watch. "He often interjects in the comments to correct false information. Sometimes he posts news himself. . . .  People want to know what’s going on, Alison told me; they just don’t know how to find the answer, whom to call, where to look. That’s what reporters are for."

Godfrey touches on another national trend seen all over the country: "In the absence of local coverage, all news becomes national news: Instead of reading about local policy decisions, people read about the blacklisting of Dr. Seuss books. Instead of learning about their own local candidates, they consume angry takes about Marjorie Taylor Greene," the radical Republican congresswoman from Georgia.

And she senses an even more disturbing trend, relayed by Mayor Jon Billups, who was fired as The Hawk Eye's circulation director in 2017: "Since the purchase of the paper, he’s noticed a growing negative self-image among residents, he told me. Fewer people see Burlington as a nice place to live; they seem to like their neighbors less. 'We’re struggling with not having [this] iconic thing.' As mayor, he helped start a newsletter to keep residents updated on city projects. 'It’s a matter of time before our local paper does not exist.'"

Like many towns with shriveled papers, Burlington has an online news site, the Burlington Beacon, founded by Jeff Abell, soon joined by William Smith, both former Hawk Eye reporters. "The Beacon is far from profitable. Until recently, Abell paid Smith from his own pocket. The two work out of Abell’s comic-book store in downtown Burlington," Godfrey reports. “Jeff and Will are doing their best,” Alison told her in an interview at the newspaper's building, now for sale. “But doggone it, it would take 150 years to build up what they had here.”

Godfrey reflects, "When people lament the decline of small newspapers, they tend to emphasize the most important stories that will go uncovered: political corruption, school-board scandals, zoning-board hearings, police misconduct. They are right to worry about that. But often overlooked are the more quotidian stories, the ones that disappear first when a paper loses resources: stories about the annual Teddy Bear Picnic at Crapo Park, the town-hall meeting about the new swimming-pool design, and the tractor games during the Denmark Heritage Days. These stories are the connective tissue of a community; they introduce people to their neighbors, and they encourage readers to listen to and empathize with one another. When that tissue disintegrates, something vital rots away. We don’t often stop to ponder the way that a newspaper’s collapse makes people feel: less connected, more alone. As local news crumbles, so does our tether to one another."

DEADLINE EXTENDED to Oct. 12 for abstracts of papers responding to initiative on journalism, citizenship and democracy

Abstracts are due Oct. 12Sept. 19 in response to AEJMC's call for papers exploring "relationships between journalism education and practice with citizenship, communities and democracy in the digital age." The headline of the call is "Revitalizing the Bonds of Journalism, Citizenship and Democracy."

The call says the reviewers, led by COMJIG member Jack Rosenberry, will be "particularly interested in papers that develop and test a new curriculum, or experiment with a practice innovation in the newsroom or in other media."

The call is a result of an initiative by the Kettering Foundation that convened a select group of journalism educators to discuss how service to democracy can play a larger role in journalism education.

As Jack said in a Sept. 9 message to COMJIG members, the call is "focused on journalism that helps communities to recognize their shared problems and act on them. Our goal is to develop innovative ideas for meaningful changes in journalism education."

Interested scholars are invited to submit, by Sept. 19, abstracts of no more than 1,500 words that clearly state: (1) The objective of the work and its relevance to the topic of how journalism can address problems of democracy by helping foster the process of citizens working together to solve shared public problems; (2) The methods that will be used to examine the question or topic; (3) What the project is expected to discover; and (4) What will be the expected significance of the work.

Abstracts will undergo peer review and up to 20 proposals will be selected for researchers to turn into full papers by April 2016. Top papers as selected by further peer review will be presented at the 2016 AEJMC conference in Minneapolis and also appear in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. The very top papers will earn cash awards.

Full details of the research call, including the process for submitting the abstracts, can be found at http://www.aejmc.org/home/2015/07/citizenship-democracy/.

Digital Communities and How to Build Them

Here's an article discussing how to build digital communities as one strategy to sustain news organizations:

Why Journalism Needs to Build With the Community, Not for It
 

What are your thoughts? We'd like to know!

Readers more loyal to large digital news sites. Implications?

This piece from Poynter caught my eye -- Report: readers more loyal to large news sites.

The latest report by analytics firm Parse.ly indicates large news sites see a greater percentage of visitors return within 30 days than small news sites do.

That finding runs counter to the company’s internal hypothesis that niche sites would have higher return rates, the company said in an email.

(Note, this is one of those reports that to get you have to give out an email to get on a mailing list, so it's good to have a garbage email account handy.)

Although this is talking about mostly pure digital sites, it makes me wonder if there are implications for smaller community publishers as well. I've been pondering the potential squeeze on local media - it doesn't scale in an era when there is a race to the bottom in online ad rates and so scale is almost mandatory, and then when people get online I've often suspected just from observation that they gravitate to the larger national and international sites.

This makes for some very interesting thinking on the business model for local media, especially that midrange of small dailies, as mobile makes its relentless penetration.

Will print be dead by 2020?

Russell Viers contends much of print will be dead by 2020 - and he's making the argument aimed at community papers, not the big metros. Interesting debate at his blog with Kevin Slimp and others. Worth considering the graphs.

We need your help in studying Digital Creative Industries

I'm part of an EU-US study group looking into university training and digital creative industries (which includes journalism). The study is being funded to produce a set of recommendations for high-level policymakers and to create industry advisory panels.

While it may sound a bit exotic, it has implications for smaller communities. The EU experience, especially in Britain, so far has been that DCI can also be an economic driver for communities.

Details are on my blog http://bit.ly/DCIstudy

If you would take a minute to read what I've posted and lend your thoughts or recommendations, I'd appreciate it.

- Doug

Community media and mobile

At AEJMC, there was a bit of a debate about local media and their ability to withstand the mobile onslaught. I am of the opinion that even the smallest community newspaper will eventually have to confront this. Here are two articles to consider. The first is about Facebook about to launch its geolocative service (imagine the potential for advertising there).

http://www.lostremote.com/2010/08/10/facebooks-places-feature-about-to-launch/

And this is the Dave Morgan article linked to in the above post
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=133350

The comment attributed to the ValPak person in the comments area is worth considering.

Which then raises the questions for many j-schools - if, when and how do we get into the "mobile" game, which is a different world from the Web world we know.

Doug

Good investments: Small, local media companies with digital components, banker and publisher say

Jeanne Straus, right, the president of Monroe, N.Y.-based Straus Newspapers, had a question for her fellow weekly publishers in the New York Press Association when she took over as president on Friday: "What do Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., Roger Ailes of Fox News and Strauss Zelnick, the investment banker, all have in common?"

I said, "They're all rural publishers," thinking that Zelnick might be one. Two out of three wasn't bad. As Straus noted and has been reported, Ailes recently bought the Putnam County News and Recorder in Cold Spring, N.Y. And she noted that News Corp. recently bought weeklies in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. She could have also noted that Murdoch decided not to sell Ottaway Newspapers, a former Dow Jones subsidiary that has weeklies and a large rural clientele.

Answering her own question, Straus said the three men "are all headed our way – to the local community newspaper business. Strauss Zelnick said in January of this year that he wanted to invest more in 'smaller businesses … that have digital components.' And apparently he believes in old line media companies because he thinks although we don’t currently have the answer yet on the digital business – we will eventually," Straus said. "So my talk to you today is really a pep talk. Some pretty savvy media watchers think you – and I – are perfectly positioned for the future – small, local media companies with a digital component." For her full remarks, click here.

The digital component was my topic the next day, at a presentation arguing that weekly newspapers need to enter the 24/7 world: "For decades now, Americans have grown more accustomed to getting their news for free: First from radio, then TV, then from the Internet. (I say people get news free from the Internet, because while they pay for Internet access, there are plenty of free news sites.) Now, on top of the phenomenon of news for free, is the phenomenon that is already changing weekly newspapering: Americans are increasingly expecting to get their news immediately. Increasingly, your readers simply will not understand why they have to wait several days to read in your newspaper the local news that they heard about at the grocery, the post office, the bar or the coffee shop. There will be a demand for immediate local news, in the form of text, and someone will fill it." (Read more)

Also at the conference, the publishers voted to add this to the NYPA by-laws: "NYPA members are urged to conduct business with high ethical standards and practice good journalism ethics as exemplified by the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics."

Convergence Newsletter - special communities issue

The Convergence Newsletter is seeking contributions for its June issue on the impact of convergence and distributed journalism in communities.

We are looking for articles not only on geographic communities, but also on social and economic ones. How has the online world fostered community? Or split it apart? Or realigned it? We hear a lot about the issues of big-city dailies, but how is this playing out in smaller communities, or in communities never envisioned before?

What "convergence" are we looking for, how do we define it? We don't. We think Rich Gordon did a great job many years ago and will consider submissions in any of these areas. Likewise, this is not solely about news and journalism (as we classically define it). Technological convergence, for instance, may be forming its own social communities with their own means of information sharing. And, shifting back to the geographical for a moment, how is all this interacting with the warp and weave of community structures and life?

The June issue is part of our new realignment into topical issues. We hope to have a communities and convergence issue twice a year.

The Convergence Newsletter has about 1,000 subscribers (and growing - if you don't get it, please feel free to subscribe for free or visit our blog), is published out of the University of South Carolina and Newsplex once a month except for June and January. We call it a journal of first impression. Most pieces run from 600-1,200 words. It is not peer reviewed, but it is edited. It's an excellent place to work on the kernel of a thought that may blossom into a longer publication or to write about notable things that may not become a longer project but are just as valuable to know about. (For instance, I saw a paper for a class the other day that had a unique set of interviews with Lawrence Journal-World staffers about the problems with comments on the site and how to deal with those.)

If you have a proposal, please e-mail me (dfisher@sc.edu). You'll probably hear back from Brad Petit, the day-to-day editor, who will work out details with you.

Thanks,
Doug Fisher
Executive Editor

COMJIG to tackle tough issues at AEJMC in August

Thanks to excellent panel ideas from COMJIG members, officers Liz Hansen (vice-chair and programming chair) and I (your fearful chair) were able to cobble together what I think is a pretty exciting and boundary-pushing program for the August AEJMC convention. Once again, I think our group has transformed from "The Little IG That Could" (as founding chair Jock Lauterer once called us) to our new identity as "The Little Group with a Big Footprint" (as immediate past chair Peggy Kuhr described us in August).

At the infamous "chip auction" at AEJMC's winter meeting, held in St. Louis in December, Liz and I frantically negotiated with a variety of other AEJMC groups to lock in the following program for the Aug. 6-9 convention in Chicago. We also managed to make sure all COMJIG sessions are held Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, thus alleviating our members of the pain and loneliness of talking to empty seats during AEJMC's dreaded Saturday afternoon time slots.

That said, here's the lineup for August:

On Wednesday, Aug. 6, we open our program at 10 a.m. with "Anonymity and Identity in the News," a debate about the pros and cons of anonymity in our biz, from the use of anonymous sources to news stories to the beautiful ugliness of anonymous posts to online discussion boards. The panel is co-sponsored with the Media Ethics Division, and this session marks COMJIG's first formal collaboration with the Media Ethics folks.

At 1:30 p.m. on Aug. 6, COMJIG has another first-time partnership, this time with the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Interest Group: "Beyond Geographic Community -- Culturally Defined Community Newspapers in the Chicago Area." The panel will feature representatives of a variety of ethnic, religious, and GLBT media in the Chicago area. (Special props to our PF&R chair Ralph Hanson for throwing this one together at the last minute -- it attracted a lot of potential co-sponsors).

Following that session on Wednesday, COMJIG again participates in a mini-plenary session (our third year in a row for the high-profile sessions!). Titled "The Transformation of Print Journalism," this panel addresses AEJMC's challenge to divisions and interest groups to offer at least one program that focuses on the future of the industry, and will feature a mix of professionals and scholars who will discuss how a variety of print media are adapting and thriving in the digital/online age. This session is co-sponsored by our friends in the Civic & Citizen Journalism Interest Group, Media Management & Economics Division, and the Newspaper Division.

Thursday's programming starts at 1:30 p.m. with COMJIG's scholar-to-scholar research session. COMJIG chair Bill Reader and a team of anonymous judges will choose the best-designed poster and present the winner with a very special prize (don't worry -- it'll be the kind of prize somebody will actually be happy to receive).

Then at 5 p.m., we team up with Civic/Citizen again for a session titled "What the F***?!! Dealing with offensive postings on news Web sites," which should prove to be a lively, R-rated (for language) discussion of the place of profanity in audience-feedback forums. (As a side note, we had a lot of fun during the planning sessions referring to this as the "F*** Panel" -- it was just like being back in the newsroom).

COMJIG and Civic/Citizen will follow up last year's joint members' meeting with another one, tentatively scheduled for 6:45-9 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 7. We will be working with Civic/Citizen to come up with a special topic for the joint members' meeting, and are hoping to sneak some Chicago deep-dish past the hotel-catering cops so we can meet and eat. Thanks to our former research chair Jack Rosenberry (now Civic/Citizen chair) and Civic/Citizen vice-chair Mary Beth Callie for agreeing to turn our members' meetings into a bonus round-table discussion.

On Friday, we'll start the day with our sole-sponsored research-paper session at 8:15 a.m. Research chair Andris Straumanis will honcho that shindig, at which we also will be presenting the top student paper with our first-ever prize of $100 (so be sure to encourage your community-minded graduate students to submit their papers to COMJIG!).

Then after lunch, we'll team up with the Newspaper Division for an amazing panel titled "Case Studies of Courage in Community Journalism," which will feature a panel of small-town newspaper editors who battled problems in their communities at great personal risk. Thanks to COMJIG stalwart and former PF&R chair Al Cross of the Institute for Rural Journalism & Community Issues for not only pitching this excellent panel idea, but for offering some IRJCI funds to help cover the travel expenses of our brave panelists.

Then at 3:30 p.m. Friday, we'll close out COMJIG's programming with the teaching panel, "Whose Learning Curve Is It? Strategies for Incorporating Digital Media Into Civic-Oriented Students Media and Courses," a teaching panel that will give all of us ideas for learning how those of us trained in "legacy media" can get up to speed -- and STAY up to speed -- on the whiz-bang techno-mojo needed in today's poly-media environment. This is another good partnership with Civic/Citizen.

Again, many thanks to all of the COMJIG members who submitted panel ideas. We can never find co-sponsors for all of them, but it's nice to have so many members who give us great ideas for programming.