This headline has a hot link: Ashland.news
Click on it and find the first edition of a new "newspaper."
Newspaper is in quotes because it isn't a newspaper. It isn't printed on paper. It is a website, attempting to do the things that local newspapers formerly did, but now do not.
Ashland.news re-creates a local newspaper for Ashland, published via a website. It will present the sort of news that communities create when normal living takes place there. It will publish news about schools, city government, special events, and the goings-on at Southern Oregon University, Shakespeare, and other institutions important to Ashland. Most of what happens in Ashland isn't "newsworthy" to people outside the area: Snow days at Ashland High School, a street closure, a construction project at Lithia Park. Ashland faced the fate of communities all across America. The business model for their local news disappeared.
The Medford-Ashland area has it better than most places our size. Medford is a TV broadcast center for a region with over 400,000 people. We have four local stations that broadcast news. TV reporters want stories to fill their "news hole" and Ashland gets some of that attention. TV news has a strong bias toward stories that are visually interesting. Fires are visual. Protests with vivid signs are visual. It is the nature of TV.
Ashland.news will publish those stories and more: Newspaper-type stories. Much of what is important for people to know about their community is only accessable to an audience willing to read. That is why newspapers thrived. For most of the 20th century small-town newspapers were monopolies that supported news-gathering through ad revenue. Print newspapers still get public notice revenue and they get paid to run obituaries, but their classified advertising drifted to Craigslist, eBay, realtor.com, and other on-line sites. Display ads nearly disappeared--except for advertisements for the newspaper itself. Newspapers get paid to deliver inserts. Inserts still work. The revenue does not support robust news-gathering, so we got less and less of it. Ashland residents noticed.
Ashland.news expects to thrive with a different business model from traditional newspapers: Donations. It is the model of public radio and television. People who value the service are asked to pay for it voluntarily. Because it is on-line instead of a physical newspaper, people who donate are paying for news not paper and delivery.
Ashland.news got started with some founder/angel donors, but it will survive long term by building a subscriber/donor base. People pay for "TV worth watching." People who value public radio donate to it. We are accustomed to subscription services. If people value newspaper-type news, they will pay for it voluntarily. That is the plan.
Will Ashland.news succeed? We don't know yet. If a couple thousand Ashland households value local news, then it will. The old model is broken. This may be the future of local news.
[Disclosure: I am one of the founding donors to Ashland.news. I have no financial interest in it. The nonprofit paper has a board of directors; I am not on it. I wish Ashland.news well. In the future I might decide to run display ads in the paper to see if people who read Ashland.news find this blog of interest. In that case I will pay the same rate as anyone else.]
6 comments:
Thanks for posting this, Peter. Even living in Gold Hill, I found several interesting articles to read. What I didn't find a a link to donate or subscribe, which I will find out how to do today.
Thanks, Peter! Very well said, as usual.
Regarding the donate button, we have two on the home page, one in right corner of top banner, other at bottom right under "Support Local News"
I'll try posting a link to where the button takes you:
"The old model is broken. This may be the future of local news."
Sad, but probably true. Over the years I've gotten hooked on reading a newspaper on the couch with a cup of coffee. Of course, that started at a time when people shared the same reality. Now we can go online and be fed whatever version of reality we want to hear. Call me a Luddite, but I preferred it when we could at least agree on who the president is.
Oh, well. This too shall pass.
For decades, I've had home delivery of the Oregonian, WSJ, and NY Times. This also gave me access to the online replica edition of each of these newspapers. I prefer that, no the normal we site listing of each story. Here in Florida, I've had to resort to only the online replica editions, as home delivery wasn't possible here in central Florida. I've confused with those 3, and have added the Orlando Sentinel, Leesburg Daily Commercial, Pamplin publications, and The Washington Post. For a short time I also got the Salem Reporter(online only, and similar to Ashland).
Of course, I also have access to other news stories too via Feedly and Google News.
It's quite interesting to see which stories make it to all the news sources I subscribe to, and the unique stories that also come to me each day.
I wish the folks at Ashland luck.
I realize I'm in the minority. Too bad more don't read some of the quality news sources. There simply is not enough time to read everything out there, but it is quite useful to read multiple sides of the major issues of the day. I try to do that, as it becomes 3asier to identify the reality.
I hope this website survives and can pay for some good investigative journalism.
Local tv news is failing America.
Medford does not have it well. Quantity of media outlets does not equal quality journalism.
It used to be advertising paid the the news gathering business, and subscriptions paid for home delivery.
Both advertising and home delivery is way down.
Subscriptions, online or delivery, cannot cover all the costs. Too much "free" online news. Perhaps only Google is making money, but not sharing the cost of news gathering or reporting.
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