New wave local news
There’s plenty of reason for hope and more than enough money to make this work.
A year or two from now, maybe sooner, you’ll find a Sunday edition of The Devil Strip on your front step. It’s thick with Akron, not wire stories and coupons or circulars from national big box sellers. Still lots of events, arts, music and culture but now there’s meaty reporting with depth and context for topics that concern you because you care about the future of our community.
From what keeps local students from graduating high school or college to what happens to Nepali refugees here after the Trump Administration removed their protected status to understanding who’s responsible for the University of Akron’s massive financial mess to how we increase homeownership for black residents and how that could change the city to a look at whether medical marijuana could become for Akron what oatmeal and rubber once was — while examining what’s happened to local people of color whose lives were ruined by drug charges for what may soon be decriminalized.
Some of these stories unfold as series through print, videos, podcasts and live events. Everyday, we post five to ten stories — a mix of music, theatre, news, food, community, entrepreneurship, etc. — from 12 to 15 full- and part-time reporters, editors and staff, as well as a network of freelancers ranging from professional to beginner. The weekly paper helps you catch what you missed online. The online elements add depth and understanding.
You attend our quarterly Town Hall Editorial Meeting to offer feedback on stories we’ve done and to make suggestions for future profiles, features or investigations. We share what we’re putting together and ask for help with sources and information. You meet someone in our Scribes program, which trains and pays regular Akronites to document arts, music and the cultural events as well as government meetings. You hear how, with an assist from the Neighborhoods Editor, someone in Summit Lake helped surface overlooked stories that make you think a little differently about that neighborhood.
Not only have you circled the date for that summer’s Signal Tree Festival but you’re doing your part for Akron Homecoming Month, inviting friends who moved away to come back for a well-timed visit.
That’s our future, some version of it, a tweak or two notwithstanding. I don’t expect to win the lottery or inherit a large sum of money. We can do this with a lot less than you think, and with a little help from some civically-minded folks, we can do it sooner too.
I’ll explain how and what it’ll take as well as who and when with some why sprinkled throughout. But first…
Free your mind and the rest will follow.
“…I deeply believe that newspapers, well-edited, well-published, are wonderfully situated to be instruments of helping America find its way, solve its problems, seize its opportunities. And that’s an ennobling way to spend one’s life.” — Jim Batten, Knight Ridder CEO (1995)
The Macon Telegraph, my hometown paper, was first published on November 1, 1826, a decade before Akron, my new home, became an incorporated village. It began as a weekly paper, published by a pharmacist from New Hampshire named Myron Bartlet and over its 191-year history has absorbed six other papers. One was the Macon News, which was started in 1884 by a former Telegraph employee — 16-year-old Jerome Pound who got rolling with just $8 which is about $200 now.
We forget how new the news is. How the papers we regard as institutions now were often enough founded by regular schmoes. None were birthed by large companies and investment groups, just gobbled up by them later. To get started, they didn’t require a ton of capital or attempt to reach everyone, just the people in the towns they wanted to serve. Quality, not quantity or volume, was their strategic advantage.
As much fun as it is to mourn the death of print media and local journalism, we could instead become local news radicals.
By radical, I mean less like Ninja Turtles or protesters in open rebellion (obviously paid by George Soros, I know! I know!) and more what the word actually means: getting back to our roots. In this case, that’s local needs, local control and local ownership.
We generally seem to agree the current business model is broken, but we keep trying to prop it up, which is bonkerballs to me. Maybe that’s because we disagree why the business is busted and don’t realize we’re not helping journalism as much as helping large companies who should be investing in themselves their damn selves.
You say The Internet. I say it’s the continued sacrifice of local coverage to maintain double-digit profit margins that get shipped out-of-town to pay off investors and pay down enormous debt. Pah-tate-oh, po-tot-oh.
No one ever says po-tot-oh.
Here’s the catch: We really shouldn’t limit the discussion about the future of local news to a search for healthy revenue streams to siphon.
Let’s have a philosophical awakening too.
If it helps, think of it as small batch, neighborhood-to-tablet, craft news. The devotedly local, artisan approach works for beer, food and t-shirts, so why wouldn’t that mindset also help sustain journalism that is thoughtful, empathetic and engaging? Let’s dust off and update “the Knight Formula.” What’s old is new again.
“In each case — Miami, Detroit, Chicago — as in Akron, (Jack) Knight would pour news and feature resources into the paper, hire like-minded editors and create editorial policies fiercely independent of political parties and business pressures. ‘The Knight Formula’ was locking in.” — Davis ‘Buzz’ Merritt, from “Knightfall: Knight Ridder and How the Erosion of Newspaper Journalism Is Putting Democracy at Risk”
This isn’t just feel-good, nostalgia stuff. It’s good strategy. New wave local news has three distinct advantages over its corporate counterparts:
Perspective — Community advocacy puts you and your readers on the same team. You champion what’s good and unique about where you live. You uncover and address the problems holding your city back. No other entity can be as valuable an arbiter for a community as journalism.
Story Quality — For all the hand-wringing about Facebook’s impact on news, we seldom concede that it works because we’re overloaded with information and crave filters: our friends …and the randos we added on Facebook. I was part of the problem, running digital for two TV stations and posting dozens of stories a day to indiscriminately drive eyeballs to the website with wire stories and network partner content. That makes the news disposable. There’s the opportunity for us.
Imagine the difference when reporters produce one or two stories a week and maybe one deep dive a month, instead of their current day-turn reality. Your customers get less volume but they net more journalism because they get more depth and context.
Financial Freedom — You are not the customer at most local newspapers and TV stations. In fact, you and your attention are the products being sold. When you are the customer, your news looks different.
Examples: Voice of San Diego, City Bureau in Chicago, the Bay Area’s Berkeleyside, VT Digger in Vermont, the Denverite, Ohio’s Richland Source, The New Tropic in Miami, Michigan’s The Rapidian, the Texas Tribune and the Tyler Loop in the Lone Star State, as well as local news co-ops like The Bristol Cable in Britain and The Ferret in Scotland.
These outlets invest in their news product specifically to serve the people in their communities. They don’t invest in TV towers and daily papers, which are good for reaching ALL THE PEOPLE but are expensive. Without either burden, you are millions of dollars lighter so you don’t need as much to do quality journalism.
tl;dr — Go small and go local.
Rubber, meet the road.
Let’s get serious about the daydream that opened this post. Why should you believe that’s doable? After all, local news is dying and nobody reads newspapers and Akron is shrinking and the end of the world is nigh.
Maths.
The Beacon Journal’s circulation reportedly averages 68,000 copies a day. Assuming a generous single-copy sales rate of 20 percent means they have almost 55,000 subscribers, which, even if everyone was on the cheapest option ($9.99/mo. for Sat-Sun delivery and digital access), brings in about $6.6 million reader-direct revenue annually. That doesn’t include rack sales, advertising or merch.
We could pay for the last three years of The Devil Strip —that’s hundreds of profiles on Akron’s artists, musicians, entrepreneurs and civic leaders, reporting on former UA President Scott Scarborough, the hope-inspired series on locals in recovery from opioid addiction, Signal Tree Fest and Live at Lock 4, the Akropreneur videos and podcasts, etc., etc. — with what the ABJ makes on subscriptions in one month.
I say this to challenge the myth that cities the size of Akron can’t support good local journalism — not to take a shot at the Beacon Journal or their people.
There’s more than enough money here to do right by this city. Everything I described in the opening would be sustainable with only 10 percent of the daily’s total number of subscribers. With half that, we could ramp up local news, improve our arts and culture coverage and fund the Scribes program for a year. Whether that comes from some Akron-loving philanthropists, foundation support or jumping in the co-op campaign, all the wealth we’d create says in and around Akron, in addition to the public good.
The point:
I’m not mad at businesses trying to business. My point is that if we care most about how local news benefits our communities, there’s a better way to do this than to keep propping up a model that isn’t working for our cities, the people in them or the journalists in these outlets.
There’s another way and it’s not a pipedream.
