Rural community newspapers have long been achieving the goals of public journalism. We create a new model for journalism--a public-private hybrid--to help rural community newspapers thrive in a time of rapid demographic and economic change.
Spring 2007
by John Q. Murray
The Clark Fork Chronicle, circulation 2,700, is just starting its fourth year. We are a typical community weekly, covering Montana’s State House District 14. Our readership area follows the Clark Fork River, winding through two counties, four school districts, four rural fire districts, two U.S. Forest Service ranger districts, two incorporated towns, nine zip codes and seventeen voting precincts.
Jock Lauterer, author of the textbook Community Journalism, would recognize us as relentlessly local, focused on becoming the local experts on the public life of our area. Our typical front page has our top local hard news story, coverage of a local public meeting or event, a local feature story, and a feature photo of a local event – often a local child, a 50th wedding anniversary.
Yep, we’re relentlessly local. We live here, our families live here—my wife’s grandma just turned 95—and we care.
There’s no real secret to what we do: We attend and report on as many local public meetings as we can and attend state and federal meetings when they are of interest to our readers. Schools are the heart of our communities, so we write as much as we can and encourage student contributions. We write about new and expanding local businesses, local residents and their achievements and milestones, local crimes and court cases, and we try to keep people informed about all the local private organizations: the anti-drug use groups, the chamber of commerce, the senior citizens. We started a church page to recap pastors’ messages. Our readership area includes a lot of public land so we also follow forest management, wildfires, and growth issues.
You wouldn’t think any of this would be worth discussing. But given that there are three other newspapers in the same readership area, it says a lot about the state of rural journalism that the Clark Fork Chronicle has grown steadily over its first four years.
Why have we succeeded? Why was this particular niche—providing local news—available for us to fill, especially when there was an existing long-established weekly already in the area?
Because the business model for rural newspapers no longer works. We are in the midst of vast interconnected demographic and economic changes. We’ve seen our traditional natural resource industries
decline and families move away in search of work. That has cut into our base of traditional advertisers—the local mom-and-pop stores. With folks now driving fifty to one-hundred miles to shop in the big-box stores, many of our rural areas are becoming outlying bedroom communities of the regional economic centers, with little local commerce of their own.
At the same time, many baby-boomers are retiring to the “third coast”—the Rocky Mountain states and especially western Montana—to enjoy recreation and wildlife on the vast neighboring public lands. Some are bringing their own money and businesses with them, but many of those businesses, enabled by the Internet and low-cost communications, operate in markets elsewhere in the country and the world. They don’t need to advertise in their local community newspaper.
If you study rural newspapers owned by out-of-town interests, you find advertisements from other towns, other counties, other states. The reporters’ names in the staff boxes change every six to eight months as the companies reduce salaries to the point where young journalism grads can’t afford both food and gas.
Other changes are more subtle but can be summed up in four words: fewer stories, bigger pictures. Over time, the editorial choices start to tilt toward stories and photos intended to move papers off the drugstore racks: wrecks, crime, conflict. To keep a newspaper alive under a strict commercial model in an economically depressed rural county, the formula is too often to reduce costs and increase revenues. I know of one rural weekly that even tried to charge for a correction, offering ad space to the offended party rather than a mea culpa.
The danger of operating under that old business model in a new economy is that many rural newspapers could enter what University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer calls the “death spiral”: As the managers of regional chains cut costs by reducing the local news staff, the resulting drop in quality reduces circulation, which leads to more cost-cutting, which leads to lower circulation, more cost-cutting, and so on.
The Institute for Rural Jouranlism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky notes that the metropolitan dailies are also failing their outlying rural areas. Subject to the same cost-cutting measures, they are pulling their reporters back to focus on their own metropolitan areas; rural issues are ignored.
At first, we were surprised that there was such little overlap in the stories covered by the Clark Fork Chronicle and our rival weekly and the nearby metropolitan daily. Sadly, after further reflection, it was not surprising at all. We were the only newspaper willing to invest in the public life of the community by sending reporters to these public meetings. By simply being there, we were able to report on the news breaking in those meetings, while also hearing about leads on other important stories. In our first three years, we wrote more than 1.7 million words in more than 3,000 stories that otherwise wouldn’t have been told.
It is clear that the purely commercial model is failing in our rural areas and that we need to come up with a new model. Because our approach has been consistent with the goals of what is known as “public journalism” or “civic journalism,” we looked to that movement for the basic framework.
Public journalism is a grass-roots reform movement that started among larger metropolitan newspapers in the early 90s. Champions of civic journalism believe that the newspaper plays a critical role in our constitutional democracy and that by thinking of ourselves as full-time citizens and experts on public life, journalists can help all citizens better participate in our public decision making.
Newspapers implemented public journalism in a wide variety of projects, most of them dedicated to public listening that let the public set the agenda for the newspaper’s coverage of local issues. These listening projects included: discussions over pizza, forums, polls, questionnaires, focus groups, clip-out surveys, interview projects, and formal panels. However, few if any of these projects advanced beyond the pilot project stage to become institutionalized in the organizational structure of the newspaper.
One critique, written in 1999 by Michael Schudson, a sociology professor at the University of California at San Diego, points out that public journalism does not represent a fundamentally new model of journalism. Professional journalists still act as trustees on behalf of the public and continue to exercise their professional judgment as to what constitutes news. Schudson suggested that other potential alternatives to the “trustee model” do exist: an ombudsman; media critics and media reporters; local or national news councils; and even, he suggests, “publicly-owned news institutions such as the Public Broadcasting Service.”
And so, to formally align ourselves with the goals of the public journalism movement, to establish ongoing formal methods of obtaining feedback from our communities during a time of rapid growth, and to provide ways for our new residents and business owners to support their local community newspapers as the pure commercial model fails our rural areas, we created the Corporation for Public Community Newspapers.
CPCN is an independent nonprofit organization with a dues-paying membership. Members attend regular meetings to: (1) review the progress of the local community newspaper toward its agreed-upon goals; (2) identify special reporting projects that the newspaper should undertake; and (3) vote to provide funding for specific special projects.
The organization has three standing committees: the review committee, the special projects committee, and an outreach committee that focuses on the group’s membership and funding needs.
In implementing the nonprofit, inspiration came from a hybrid automobile. Just as my Honda Civic uses gas and electric motors to improve overall performance, we engineered a hybrid organization to take advantage of the strengths and best features of the for-profit and nonprofit.
The nonprofit does not seek to launch its own newspapers that will compete with existing locally-owned newspapers. Instead, it contracts with the existing papers to guarantee free space for community organizations and set minimum target levels for regular coverage of community events. The supplemental funding provided by the nonprofit means the newspaper can increase its news hole to provide that coverage, regardless of the amount of advertising sold that week.
The nonprofit is its own distinct organization, completely separate from the for-profit newspaper, but the two enter into a binding contract that gives the nonprofit full budget authority over the special projects. The members of the nonprofit vote on the special projects and provide the funding.
The newspaper is free to turn down the project and the funding. In that case, the nonprofit can seek to contract with freelancers or other citizen journalists to produce the special projects. Conversely, the newspaper can choose to implement all special projects recommended by the non-profit, even if they are not fully funded.
At the for-profit newspaper, journalists still exercise their professional judgment as to what constitutes news and are ultimately responsible for every word published.
The professional journalists have some extra work. They must prepare a report for the annual or an equivalent performance review, and must pursue the requested special projects. (At the Clark Fork Chronicle, it will likely mean one more job for the publisher.)
The end result is that the public and the community newspaper, working in collaboration, have a formal ongoing mechanism for setting the community’s news agenda.
The nonprofit also acts as a focal point for citizen journalism, providing tools and training to community members so that they can contribute stories. Beyond adopting the Rural News Network curriculum, we hope to develop Internet-based wizards to help authors write 5-W ledes and create first drafts using the traditional inverted-pyramid structure. Another effort involves analyzing news stories to create a taxonomy of story types, and creating templates for each of these major story types.
The nonprofit would serve as an open source clearinghouse for all projects that can help rural newspapers, such as open-source Web sites, and add-ons that allow online readers to rate story quality.
We are seeing a real hunger for information about our local communities. It has been very rewarding to be a part of the launch of the Chronicle where we regularly hear people tell us that they read every issue word for word, cover to cover. I believe the pendulum is starting to swing back in the direction of high-quality local community newspapers, and that we are at the beginning of a long period of renewal of American rural journalism.