Back in 2000, I attended a national conference on visual journalism and the future of newspapers. As a young journalist, I came away with loads of enthusiasm for the industry, and new book that would show me the way. It’s called “2020: Visions of the Newspaper of the Future,” and it still sits on my office desk today, mostly so I can thumb through the pages as I’m waiting for my computer to restart.
I still love the premise of the book. It includes chapters from some of that era’s leading industry voices as they imagined what a newspaper would look like in the very futuristic year of 2020. They prototyped the supposed publications of today – some were full glossy magazines; others were tailored to an individual reader’s interests; and many were to be read on a flexible e-reader that was meant to look and feel just like a newspaper.
The major problem with the book, other than its obvious swing-and-miss on the technology, is that it failed to understand the looming financial challenges that would threaten local news across the country in the years and decades ahead.
Those would be the end of journalism’s so-called “glory days” – that is, when newsrooms were flush and pockets were deep. In 2000, like the preceding decades, where the money came from was never much of a mystery. The newspaper business was big, and it was consistent, with revenue flowing in from print advertising, subscriptions, and classifieds. It was hard, I’m sure, to have imagined otherwise.
The years since have been a different story. We’ve seen the rise of Google, Facebook and Twitter, all of which have steered attention and advertising dollars away from local news. We’ve seen the invention of smartphones and high-speed connections, which gave us the ability to report the news faster than ever. None of these advancements have done much to make local news a more sustainable business.
Today, we’re in an era of consolidation, with hedge funds swooping in to pick up distressed properties. “Strip-mining” is the best description I’ve heard to describe the groups that by the end of the year are expected to own more than 50% of all daily newspaper circulation in America.
Local journalism is at a crossroads, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only shortened whatever runway we have to solve a crisis that’s long been brewing. Much like the editors back in 2000, I don’t know what technical or societal changes are to emerge in the next 20 years. I do know that our challenge is financial. How will local institutions, like the Concord Monitor and many other across our state, region and country, support the newsrooms that our communities deserve? How will our industry continue to play our fundamental role as community watchdog as the traditional financial underpinnings continue to vanish.
While I’m not going to look 20 years down the road, I am confident that there’s a way to make local newsrooms sustainable. But it’ll take a combination of approaches. Think of these as slices of the pie. Individually, they won’t solve the problem, but together they can help rebuild local journalism for future generations.
Advertising: Yes, it’ll still be there because it continues to be a valuable tool. In fact, if anything comes out of this pandemic, it’ll be that the local paper helped local businesses connect with local customers, in print and online, when we all needed it the most. The Monitor has been doing this in recent months with a program meant to help our local business community get back on its feet. There’s still value to telling your story and communicating that message through the local media outlet.
Subscribers: These will continue to be our industry’s most important customers because they’re the ones most closely connected to our core mission – local news. Many of our readers are the cover-to-cover type, and quite often our most dedicated readers are our print readers. There’s still something about the print product that many value above digital. The familiarity and the routine are certainly part of the lure, but I suspect that the daily paper itself has a beginning, a middle, and an end is part of the draw. In a world with a never-ending news cycle, being “finished” with the news for the day may be appealing to many of us.
What our industry needs to do is figure out how to translate that deep love and appetite for local news that we see with our print readers to an online audience. It’s starting to happen, as we see with the rise in our digital only subscriptions. The digital replica of our print edition is a nice bridge between print and online, and it continues to gain traction across the industry. However you read, there’s still no better way to support local journalism than with a subscription.
Community support: Speaking of dedicated readers, over the past few months they have stepped up big time by sending in donations via our online portal and by check. In all, the Monitor brought in about $45,000, a critical infusion of money precisely at the time when we needed it to ensure we could deliver important information during the pandemic. That money has gone directly to our newsroom. While we don’t have specific plans for any new donation drives in the future, this may become a part of the model for many local news organizations like ours.
Philanthropy: The Monitor has already made some traction in this area thanks to local and national partnerships. Report for America, a thriving nonprofit funded by many foundations across the country, is helping newsrooms like ours add to their reporting staff. Over the past month, we’ve added two new reporters to the Monitor newsroom. Eileen O’Grady covers education and Teddy Rosenbluth reports on health. Report for America and its national funders pay for half their salaries, and the Monitor connects with the community to fund the other half.
Our education beat is funded by the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, which is well established in its role of helping organizations carry out community-minded missions.
Business support: The Monitor purposely went in a different direction for the Report for America health care reporting position, turning instead to members of the health care community. That position is funded by Concord Hospital, Concord Imaging Center, Concord Regional Visiting Nurse Association, and Riverbend Community Mental Health.
These local institutions are supporting the Monitor because they agree that our communities are better when they include a free and independent press. They understand they won’t ever get to influence our reporting and, as spelled out in our terms of agreement, “The Concord Monitor will maintain editorial control and ensure editorial independence.”
Our industry needs to do a better job of building relationships with big local companies who are willing to support local journalism, not because they want to sell a product, but because they feel we have an important role to play in the health of their communities.
Legislative support: There is a growing bipartisan understanding for the need to support local news. News deserts, areas of the U.S. in which communities have no local publication or dedicated reporter, are growing by the week, and the results can be devastating. Rural America has been hit especially hard. When local news organizations aren’t playing that critical watchdog role, it can often lead to significant growth in local government spending, according to research released in 2018.
That’s part of the reason why GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is among those who has pushed a bipartisan approach to take on giants like Facebook and Google, who have profited enormously from the work of local news organizations (the Monitor is among the companies that has received grant funding from both Facebook and Google in recent months).
There are a lot of ideas out there, from collecting a tax on digital advertising services that go through Facebook and Google, to instituting tax credits for subscribing to your local newspaper.
Why it all matters: The Monitor has been a local news institution since 1864, and we plan to continue our mission well into the future. What that means is we have to find new ways to fund journalism. For a long time, most didn’t need to imagine a world without a free and independent press in their back yard. That’s changed, and it’s becoming more clear that there needs to be a shared responsibility to ensuring our longtime institutions can go forward. News organizations need to be flexible, transparent, responsive to the community’s needs, and willing to make hard choices. And community leaders, here and across the country, need to understand what’s at stake. These new partnerships and approaches are what will keep the flow of news coming – and expanding – in ways that reach all readers.
