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Matt Paxton
What do a large metro daily newspaper, a newspaper in a small New England town and an online news site in Southwestern Virginia have in common? They are all supported solely or in part by donations and grants.
The Tampa Bay Times, in St. Petersburg, Fla., started a donor campaign to honor their local reporters, which has developed into two funds, one supporting investigative reporting and the other a general journalism support fund. The Times, a for-profit company, is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies, through which contributions and grants flow to the newspaper.
The Keene Sentinel, in Keene, N.H., is a locally owned daily paper covering the southeastern counties of New Hampshire. The Sentinel has a part of their newsroom devoted to covering health care and health issues in their area that is fully supported by grants and donations. The Sentinel is a for-profit but has an arrangement with a nonprofit journalism foundation to accept donations, and also accepts them directly.
Closer to home, you may know of Cardinal News (cardinalnews. org,), an online news site covering southwest and Southside Virginia. Cardinal News is a nonprofit using a funding model similar to NPR. Content is freely available to all, and users are encouraged to support the site through one-time or recurring contributions. Cardinal started in 2021 with two reporters and just hired its seventh, who will be covering the technology beat.
I’ve been following the emergence of the donor-assisted and supported business model for local journalism for several years now. It’s increasingly clear that even The News-Gazette, which enjoys much more local advertising support than a lot of papers, cannot rely going forward on a business model based primarily on selling advertising, either print and/ or digital.
We have done a lot to supplement the revenue from the newspaper alone. We have developed a number of magazine publications over the past years that in some cases complement the newspaper, such as our Valley of Virginia Properties real estate and our Healthy Living magazines. Thirty years ago, we started Visiting Lexington magazine, which goes out in selected Virginia State Welcome Centers and locally in hotels, local businesses and street boxes. We partner with the Chamber of Commerce Serving Lexington, Buena Vista and Rockbridge Co. and the Greater Augusta Regional Chamber of Commerce on annual guides and other magazine publications. We also get revenue from our digital advertising on TheNews-Gazette. com. All of these help sustain our news operation.
The News-Gazette has had for at least 25 years, a full-time newsroom staff of six reporters and editors, which is a lot for a weekly paper. But, we have three governments to cover, as well as three school systems, law enforcement and emergency services departments, two courts, and well over a hundred local organizations. It keeps our reporters and editors very busy. We think its important work and critical that our community have access in one place to what they need to know about what’s happening in the Rockbridge area – the bad and the good.
All of this is to say that, while we have worked hard to find additional sources of revenue to balance our books, even with revenue from subscriptions, traditional advertising and additional magazine publications, the trends are not on our side.
I don’t believe that news organizations serve their communities by cutting essential newsroom staff. All you have to do is look at some of the other corporate-owned papers around us to see the decline in local news coverage. The few remaining reporters at those newspapers must be working extremely hard to cover what they do, but it is a numbers game. If a paper only has one or two reporters covering an area, they can’t begin to provide what a community needs from a local news source. We don’t want that here.
So, over the next months, you will see on our website and on our subscription renewal forms, a place to make a contribution to help support our reporters and editors. We will also be continuing our research into the legal and organizational frameworks that will support an evolving funding model for The News-Gazette. Maybe that will be a local journalism foundation that helps us and other similar local media in our area. Perhaps that foundation will own The News-Gazette but have a local board of directors. It could be something we haven’t thought of yet. Regardless, our goal is to keep The News-Gazette financially viable, and, long-term, to keep it under local control.
While the newspaper is holding its own financially, I think we need to take steps now to secure it for now and for after I’m out of the picture. Keep reading – there will be more to report as this rolls out.
