Christi Cooley, left, and Donnis Hueftle-Bullock work in the office of the Custer County Chief in Broken Bow, Nebraska. (Courtesy of Teri Finneman)
BROKEN BOW, Nebraska — When University of Kansas journalism professor Teri Finneman gives a talk about the survival of rural newspapers, she brings along three items: a bottle of soda pop, a Twix candy bar and a copy of a newspaper.
The soda and the candy bar cost more than twice as much as the newspaper, she explains, and take seconds to produce, unlike the newspaper, which required dozens of hours of work by reporters, editors and press operators.
In Broken Bow, for instance, subscribers to the Custer County Chief were paying 87 cents a week for local news. Finneman said that in North Dakota, her home state, the cost of one weekly paper had risen by one cent a year since 1930, to now 94 cents an edition.
“When you say it out loud, it’s insane,” the professor said. “Tell me any other product on the market that costs that.”
Finneman, along with colleagues at universities in Colorado and Missouri, are on a crusade to save rural, weekly newspapers in a period when the United States has seen 3,300 papers close in the past 20 years. “News deserts” — areas without newspapers — are expanding, raising the risk of an uniformed electorate and one that is more polarized by social media and talking heads.
That crusade brought the professor to this central Nebraska ranching community last summer in an effort to revive the financial fortunes of the Chief, which has chronicled life in this corner of Nebraska since 1892.
Unfortunately, she said, the Chief, like many rural newspapers, was still operating under a financial model that began in the 1800s. That’s when readers could buy a daily paper for a penny — the “penny press,” it was called — and advertisements for shops, jobs, and services provided generous revenue to finance staff and production costs. That revenue has mostly fled to the internet now.
Andrew Jackson was president back then, Finneman points out, and a whole lot has changed in the newspaper industry — an industry that she said needs to abandon its 1800s business model.
“The bread industry has evolved more than the newspaper business in 200 years,” she said.
Price, subscriptions are up
The formula followed by Finneman to revive rural newspapers has worked elsewhere in recent years, and it is showing promise in Broken Bow. Six months after the local experiment was launched, subscriptions are up at the Chief, despite a more than 40% increase in the cost of a yearly subscription.
Donnis Hueftle-Bullock, general manager of the Custer County Chief, said she is encouraged by the community’s response to changes adopted at the newspaper.
“We want to make sure that this paper survives. We believe in this paper. We believe in the communities we write about,” she said.
“We want to make sure this paper is viable for the next 20 to 30 years,” Hueftle-Bullock said.
The “Reviving Rural News” formula seems simple: Make a stronger connection between the newspaper and its community, adjust coverage of meetings, and add regular, emailed newsletters to provide more breaking news. Overall, better explain why readers need to pay more of the cost of producing a news product.
“The general public as a whole doesn’t understand what we do and why we do it,” Finneman said.
In Broken Bow, as with similar revival projects at papers in Eudora, Kansas, and Harvey County, North Dakota, it starts with reaching out to the community, through focus groups and surveys, asking residents what they want in the newspaper and what might be lacking.
Finneman said her team has discovered that few readers know the reporters and editors at their local newspaper, a connection that is key for subscribers when opting to pay more for a local paper.
Readers, she said, wanted more timely news updates and photos via “e-newsletters,” “calendars of events” to keep up with local happenings, social engagement with reporters at events and at members-only “press club” meetings, fewer opinion pieces, and more features about local people and their activities.
The bread industry has evolved more than the newspaper business in 200 years.
– Teri Finneman, Kansas journalism professor
Finneman said her team’s research surprisingly found that younger people were more willing to donate to a newspaper if they knew it was struggling financially. That, she said, flies in the face of the approach of many newspapers, which is to cater to their oldest, most long-running subscribers, discounting the younger audience as more interested in social media and cell phones.
A lot of millennials, she said, feel disconnected from the newspaper and need to be reached via social media and more digital products.
At rural revival projects in Kansas and North Dakota, regular “press club” gatherings of subscribers brought new ideas and new revenue from sponsorships, Finneman said. Newspaper-organized events were also successful, such as a holiday cookie contest at various businesses in Kansas and a “pasta fest” in North Dakota that encouraged local chefs to produce inventive dishes.
“It’s making the newspaper the center of the community again, like it used to be in the old days,” she said.
The Custer County Chief, with a circulation of 1,300, has a full-time staff of two and two part-timers, along with several “sports moms” who contribute photographs of sporting events from the nine high school programs in the Chief’s circulation area.
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Hueftle-Bullock said that with such a small staff to organize a press club or special events, the Chief has postponed work on those efforts. But it has launched a very popular e-newsletter that promotes stories coming in the print edition, she said. The opinion page was moved farther back into the paper and replaced on Page 2 with more local stories.
A local focus group and a survey found that subscribers wanted more coupons from local businesses, more features about local hobbies and people, and some changes in the newspaper’s layout.
The experiment in Broken Bow was launched with a front-page story in June written by Finneman entitled, “You likely paid 87 cents for this newspaper. It’s not enough.” Updates on the experiment followed over the next six months.
The paper eventually settled on raising the yearly subscription price to $65 — not as high as Finneman said is justified, and less than the $3 a week cost per paper to produce the Chief, but what the newspaper surmised readers would pay.
The result has been a slight rise in subscribers, according to Hueftle-Bullock, and a feeling of optimism.
Finneman said that raising the subscription price is essential for the survival of rural newspapers. Publishers, she said, have to get over the idea that readers will resist. At the Kansas newspaper, the price was more than doubled, yet 90% of readers were retained, she said, which substantially increased revenue.
“The grocery store doesn’t melt down when they raise the price of bananas. They just raise the prices,” Finneman said. “That’s just what you do to stay in business.”
Her team’s goal now is to expand the reviving rural newspapers model across the upper Midwest, where she has focused much of her work. In Kansas, she said, she hopes at least a third of the community newspapers will try the model in the next few years.
Finneman said her team will also focus future efforts on finding ways to improve salaries of community journalists and persuading more young reporters to locate in rural areas.
“People really do value the local newspaper,” she said. “[But] education is critical.”
This story first appeared in the Nebraska Examiner, a member with the Phoenix in the nonprofit States Newsroom.
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