Saving Community Journalism

The Path to Profitability

Penelope Muse Abernathy

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469615431
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

America's community newspapers have entered an age of disruption. Towns and cities continue to need the journalism and advertising so essential to nurturing local identity and connection among citizens. But as the business of newspaper publishing collides with the digital revolution, and as technology redefines consumer habits and the very notion of community, how can newspapers survive and thrive? In Saving Community Journalism, veteran media executive Penelope Muse Abernathy draws on cutting-edge research and analysis to reveal pathways to transformation and long-term profitability. Offering practical guidance for editors and publishers, Abernathy shows how newspapers can build community online and identify new opportunities to generate revenue. Examining experiences at a wide variety of community papers--from a 7, 000-circulation weekly in West Virginia to a 50, 000-circulation daily in California and a 150, 000-circulation Spanish-language weekly in the heart of Chicago-- Saving Community Journalism is designed to help journalists and media-industry managers create and implement new strategies that will allow them to prosper in the twenty-first century. Abernathy's findings will interest everyone with a stake in the health and survival of local media.

PART I Creating a New Strategy

For a lot of reasons, many people are still embracing the twentieth-century growth model. Sometimes complacency is the problem. . . . Sometimes they have no clear vision for the twenty-first century so they don’t know how they should change. But often, fear is a key issue. . . . [So] they cling defensively to what they currently have. In effect, they embrace the past, not the future.

—John P. Kotter, Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press, 1996)

CHAPTER ONE
Why It Is Critical That Newspapers Survive

The early 1950s were tense and dangerous times for the publisher and editor of the Whiteville News Reporter. Publisher Leslie Thompson, who had just secured a loan to buy out his long-standing business partner, watched as both circulation and advertising for the small twice-weekly newspaper in rural southeastern North Carolina spiraled downward in reaction to an editorial stance against the violence spawned by the Ku Klux Klan in nearby communities.

But Thompson had more than his business to worry about. Both he and editor Willard Cole had received numerous threats—anonymous notes and pamphlets placed on their car windshields or slid under the door of the newspaper office warning that the Klan was watching. In response, Cole began carrying a loaded pistol everywhere, and Thompson, breaking with tradition in the small town of Whiteville, began locking the front door of his house and established a family curfew and protocol for entering the home.

In many ways, Whiteville, population 5,000, was a sleepy southern postcard town in 1951. It was the seat of Columbus County, one of the state’s largest in area—954 square miles of farms and swampland interspersed with villages and crossroad communities. Social life and the economy revolved around the tobacco season. In late summer and early fall, local farmers sold their cured crop at one of the fifteen auction houses in Whiteville (or the smaller markets of nearby Tabor City and Chadbourn in the southern part of the county) and then settled up their accounts with the downtown merchants. In the postwar era, life was relatively simple—mules pulling farm wagons were still a common sight on Saturdays around the courthouse square. Life was also segregated for the county’s 50,000 residents, of whom 65 percent were white, 30 percent were African American, and 5 percent were Native American.

Roughly twenty miles south of Whiteville, Tabor City (population 2,000) adjoined Horry County in neighboring South Carolina, which had become a hotbed of Klan activity in the late 1940s. On July 22, 1950—a sultry Saturday night—a twenty-nine-car motorcade, with a spotlighted cross attached to the lead car, appeared on the streets of Tabor City. A week later, in an editorial, the News Reporter took note of the motorcade of 100 armed and masked men, stating: “Columbus County. . . . has no need for the Klan.”

Over the next three years, along with Horace Carter, the editor of the weekly Tabor City Tribune, Whiteville’s Thompson and Cole would print dozens of editorials and front-page articles documenting, exposing, and excoriating Klan beatings, floggings, and drive-by shootings in the southern portion of the county. Several of the editorials, issuing a clarion call to action among community citizens, ran on the front page of the News Reporter.

“Front-page editorials are unheard of today, but Cole and Thompson knew this was necessary to keep the public focused on the seriousness of the issue,” says Jim High, Leslie Thompson’s son-in-law and the current publisher of the News Reporter. The activist editor, he points out, even traveled to Charlotte 150 miles away to meet with the FBI and ask them to intervene. In 1953 more than 300 reputed Klansmen were arrested, and sixty-two—including the police chief of Fair Bluff—were convicted and served time.

The Klan activity in Columbus County ultimately attracted the attention of media outside the area, including Life magazine photographers who covered a Klan rally of 5,000 just south of Whiteville in August 1951. Still, the perseverance, tenacity, and courage of these two small community newspapers—one a weekly of 2,000 circulation and the other a semiweekly with only 4,500 subscribers—so impressed Jonathan Daniels, the editor of the News and Observer of Raleigh, one of the state’s largest newspapers, that he nominated them both for journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, which they were awarded in 1953—becoming the smallest papers ever to be awarded the Gold Medal.

Cole, who later used the Pulitzer medal as a paperweight on his desk, acknowledged the recognition, but he added in an editorial that the greatest reward of the three-year investigative endeavor was not the award itself. “We believe the richest harvest from this experience,” he wrote, “is a renewal of our faith in the soundness of awakened citizenry and a restoration of full confidence that right and justice can triumph in any community.”

In 1958, after the death of his father-in-law, High, newly graduated from college with a degree in business administration, became Whiteville’s publisher. He came home to Columbus County to find a paper on the financial brink, with half the circulation and advertising that it had prior to the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism it had produced in the early part of the decade. After consulting with several journalists and businesspeople, High decided to “take a gamble” that investing was the best way to revive the fortunes of the News Reporter “so that we could continue to be the ‘paper of record’ for Columbus County.”

High built a new plant and purchased one of the first offset presses in the state, which allowed the News Reporter to begin attracting a new and steady source of income from printing other newspapers in the area. To reverse the slide in circulation and advertising, High also committed to making the News Reporter “the source of news for the county by providing better coverage than a community of this size might expect.” Luck and the economy were with him. By the late 1960s, “the circulation and advertisers were back and we were back on our feet.”

Today, Jim High, in his eighties, is still publisher. His son Les—named for his grandfather Leslie Thompson—is the managing editor, responsible for making most of the day-to-day and strategic decisions for the News Reporter, which was founded in 1896 and is one of a rapidly shrinking number of family-owned publishing enterprises in the state. The paper, with a circulation today of 10,000, is still published two days a week (Mondays and Thursdays). On those days, Les can look out his office window and observe a time-honored ritual in Whiteville: a carrier standing on the street selling roughly 400 copies to cars queued up in front of the newspaper building.

But Les also realizes that those days may be numbered. Like his father a half century before, he faces a dual dilemma. He knows he must “modernize” and keep pace with the digital revolution if the paper is to attract a new generation of readers and advertisers. But a dramatic decline in print advertising revenue in recent years has limited the funds he has to invest in the newspaper’s digital efforts, which include the website (established in 1998), Twitter, and Facebook. Not only have many of the local advertisers that traditionally supported the News Reporter begun to defect to other traditional and digital media, but Columbus County also remains mired in an unprecedented economic slump, limiting the ability of the News Reporter to “grow” with the market.

Publisher Jim High reflects on rejecting “a nice offer we got to sell out to a chain in the 1980s. I think we made the right decision. I sure hope we did.” In the office next door, Les High reflects on the economic challenges facing Columbus County and the imperative he feels to find a “path” for the News Reporter to remain a vital source of information for the residents of that community in the coming years. He ticks off the problems facing Columbus County sixty years after the newspaper’s journalistic crusade to oust the Klan. Per capita household income in the large county is the lowest in the state, and—since Georgia-Pacific shuttered its operation—Columbus has one of the highest rates of unemployment (double the state average). In addition, it has the highest rate of obesity and diabetes of any county in the state. “The economy, health, education—we know there are a lot of quality-of-life issues here in Columbus that will affect our future,” says Les. “And if we don’t cover them, no one else will.”

Almost 600 miles northwest of Whiteville—and halfway across the country—in the heart of Chicago’s bustling downtown, thirty-six-year-old Fabiola Pomareda, managing editor of La Raza, is also on a journalistic mission. Her forty-year-old newspaper (circulation 153,000) serves a very different “community”: Chicago’s Latino population, which, according to the 2010 census, numbers roughly 800,000, or a third of the city’s 2.6 million residents.

Born in the United States and raised in Peru, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, Pomareda says her inspiration and “role model” was the mother of a teenaged friend, a Costa Rican journalist who covered “human rights issues” during Nicaragua’s civil war. Pomareda began her career as a journalist with a weekly newspaper in Costa Rica. After receiving a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Barcelona, she moved to Chicago and became a freelance writer and then a reporter for the Spanish-language weekly. Her audience, she says, are first- and second-generation Latinos—mostly from Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia—ages eighteen to sixty, who communicate primarily in Spanish. “I keep very much in mind who I was when I came here. I try not to forget,” she says. “Immigrants who come here need to understand this city and how it works—everything from how to use city transportation to how to buy clothes for the winter.”

Over the last seven years, Pomareda has written extensively about immigration (“I’ve dedicated myself to it because I’ve seen a lot of sad stories”), as well as to politics and the economy. “My job is different from what someone at the Chicago Tribune might write about,” she says. “Their stories are much broader in scope. I always have to explain to my audience what everything—every issue—means to them.” Believing “this job—‘being a reporter’—is a mission,” she is also constantly monitoring traditional media to see what is not being covered. “In recent years, I started writing a lot about organized crime and drug trafficking because no one else was. As the drug wars have heated up in Mexico, it’s spilled over here and people want to know what it means to them in Chicago.”

Appointed managing editor of La Raza in 2012, Pomareda and her staff of four reporters try to cover “everything local,” keeping a balance between “hard news” and what she refers to as “news you can use and positive news.” She says she is constantly impressed by the readership of La Raza, which includes “congressmen and -women, members of the Chicago City Council, even the DEA [the Drug Enforcement Agency].”

Fabiola Pomareda is one of a long line of passionate and tenacious Chicago journalists reporting on the issues and events that affect the city’s diverse population and communities. A half century ago, for example, at the same time that a crusading editor at a small semiweekly newspaper in Whiteville, North Carolina, was exposing the Klan, African American reporters for the Chicago Defender and the Chicago Crusader were journeying south to cover the Civil Rights struggle, sending their stories back home to inform their city’s black communities about what they saw and witnessed. Today, both publications—like many of Chicago’s other 300 ethnic news outlets—are struggling to adapt to a changing media landscape and to a readership that has largely moved on and “assimilated” into the Chicago landscape. “Race-based publications and foreign-language publications[,] . . . essentially their existence depends on being able to resist assimilation,” says veteran media analyst John Morton. “Unfortunately, assimilation in this country is pretty much an inexorable force and most of them are going to lose out.”

Stephen Franklin, former award-winning foreign correspondent and workplace reporter for the Chicago Tribune, is working hard to make sure these diverse viewpoints and voices are still heard in the digital age. He is the ethnic-news director of the Community Media Workshop, which aims to provide editorial and business guidance to the city’s print, broadcast, and digital ethnic news outlets. “The greatest problem for much of the ethnic media is time. Many were founded by immigrants long ago and failed to catch up,” says Franklin. “This problem translates into a failure to stay modern and learn all of the tools of reaching their audiences. But the ethnic media is also horribly discriminated against by advertisers who harbor stereotypes that counter the reality of the black and immigrant communities. And so, the ethnic news media is largely understaffed.”

Most of the ethnic publications are very small “mom and pop” operations that live month to month with few resources, if any, to invest in converting to digital. Even those that are part of a larger media company or owned by an investment firm with headquarters elsewhere often face the same financial struggles as their small, independent counterparts.

Since it was founded in 1970, La Raza has been owned by two different individuals—including a restaurateur and a marketer—and, recently, by a private equity firm and two publishing companies. The newspaper’s renovated three-story loft on West Ohio Street is in stark contrast to its humble beginnings—a second-floor walk-up office over a Mexican restaurant. Its weekly circulation in the 1970s was 5,000. Its second owner, Luis Rossi—a marketing executive as well as an event and music promoter—purchased La Raza in 1983 and invested heavily in the publication, often promoting it at the various entertainment events he sponsored. After ImpreMedia purchased the paper in 2004, company founder and then-CEO John Paton—a long-standing evangelist for “digital first”—implemented a strict protocol for distributing news, which is still in effect today at La Raza and its sister Spanish-language publications in six other major U.S. cities. Every story is sent out first as a mobile alert; then it is posted on the website, and that posting is announced on Facebook and Twitter. Next, an enhanced audio and video version is posted on the site. Finally, it is published in the print edition. Recent research estimates that more than 65 percent of Latino readers of La Raza have mobile phones with texting capabilities. “Much of our Web traffic comes from mobile, people reading us on phones,” says Pomareda.

Beginning in 2008, ImpreMedia also moved to aggressively “modernize” and shed “inefficient” costs—centralizing administration, print production, Web production, and technology and cutting back on print circulation in certain areas of the city. With most of the “inefficient” costs shed a half decade ago, the future success of La Raza—now owned by the Argentinian company S. A. La Nacion—depends both on its ability to attract new readers (at a time when Latino immigration is slowing) and grow revenue across its various digital platforms. Its publisher, Jimena Catarivas, points to the many efforts the paper makes to connect with and interact with its readers and its advertisers—from face-to-face meetings at numerous cultural events that the newspaper sponsors to exchanges across multiple digital platforms from Facebook to mobile.

As veteran journalist Franklin points out, all residents of Chicago should care whether La Raza and the city’s ethnic community news outlets survive. “They are vitamin supplements for their communities and more,” he says, citing “the mainstream media’s failure to write about immigrants. This involves stories ranging from merely acknowledging the way that they have changed Chicago’s cultural DNA to examining the terrible problems faced by immigrants and especially those without papers. The great gift of newspapers like La Raza is that week after week they do not have to apologize to their readers for their social conscience when they write about crime or discrimination or the problems encountered by immigrants.”

How the Mission Has Changed

The founders of our country envisioned newspapers as “watchdogs” of our democracy and sanctioned that mission with a First Amendment guarantee that set the press apart from other for-profit businesses. Over the last two centuries, many newspapers, such as the small semiweekly News Reporter in rural North Carolina, have performed that mission by serving as a steadfast conscience for the communities they covered—issuing courageous clarion calls for justice and fairness despite great personal and professional risk. Or, like the journalists at La Raza, they have sought out and covered the burning issues of the day, bubbling just below the surface in the vast and diverse neighborhoods and communities of the sprawling Chicago metropolis. Without their vigilance, such concerns might well be overlooked and ignored, and these stories would never be told.

While most recent media attention has focused on the financial travails of the large regional and “metro” newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, community newspapers are facing an equally dangerous transitional period as their revenues decline so rapidly that publishers do not have the funds necessary to invest in their digital future. Like that of their big-city cousins, their survival is equally important to ensuring that democracy remains vibrant in the twenty-first century—especially at the grassroots level.

In Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (2009), the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Alex Jones estimates that 85 percent of the enterprising journalism that ultimately affects major public-policy change has traditionally originated with newspaper reporters—on both small and large papers. “When we look back on the civil rights era, there’s a tendency to give credit to the national networks and newspapers, like the New York Times, for exposing racial injustice in the South,” says Hodding Carter III, journalist and former public official in the Carter administration. “But more than a decade before the national reporters headed South, courageous newspaper editors on small papers were already covering the story, at great risk to themselves and their families. They didn’t cover it because it was good for business, because it wasn’t. They did it because they cared about the community they served, and knew the story had to be told, despite the personal and professional sacrifices.” Carter’s father, Hodding Carter II, editor of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for a series of editorials decrying intolerance in the South (especially the mistreatment of Japanese-American soldiers returning from World War II) and often spoke out in editor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Introduction
• PART I Creating a New Strategy
• PART II Implementing a New Strategy
• PART III The New World Order
• Acknowledgments
• How to Use the Complementary Instructional Website
• Bibliography
• Index