Back in January, Pinedale Roundup editor Cali O’Hare attended a journalism workshop at the Wyoming Press Association’s conference. There she learned about an opportunity to get three months of free consulting on improving the newspaper's bottom line.
”So I was very quick to scribble Pinedale Roundup, Cali O'Hare, on my little slip of paper and toss our name into the hat for consideration,” said O’Hare. “I think it was later that afternoon at lunch we found out that we had been selected for it.”
In the last 20 years, 2,100 newspapers have shut down. In some places, that’s left no one covering the local news at all. Plus, the number of people working in newsrooms has shrunk by 57%. University of Kansas journalism professor Teri Finneman saw this as a slow moving disaster for the country and decided she couldn’t watch from the sidelines. So she and a colleague started a program called Reviving Rural News to experiment with an improved business model to help newspapers become financially solvent. They selected a few newspapers across the Midwest to participate in the experiment. When she spoke at the conference in Wyoming, she encouraged the audience to submit ideas for newspapers who’d like to participate. That’s when the Pinedale Roundup was chosen.
“ It was a unique newspaper for me to work with compared to the other ones because of what happened to them last year,” Finneman said. “The fact that they suddenly closed just overnight, their ownership just closed a series of papers over multiple states. And so their community saw the threat of what would happen if the newspaper was gone. And so that was a really interesting concept to keep in mind of, okay, this is a community that should be open to what can we do to make sure that this doesn't happen again?”
Finneman started by hosting focus groups in Sublette County to find out what changes readers want.
“ I had more people fill out the reader survey in Pinedale than any of my other places, which really showed the enthusiasm and interest in their local newspaper,” she said.
In the survey, people said they want more local focus, less out of state opinion letters and less liberal bias. Finneman asked the focus group how much more they’d be willing to pay for news that satisfies these requests. Based on their feedback, she’s encouraging the new owners of the paper to double the price of the paper from $1.00 to $2.00.
”You can't even go to a gas station and buy a candy bar. I mean, the last time I was there, it cost me $2.79 for a candy bar, and that's literally machine-produced in seconds. Whereas, your weekly newspaper took a hundred plus manual labor hours to put out,” said Finneman. “We think nothing of going to Starbucks and slapping down $7 for a muffin and a tall coffee. But when it comes to paying $2 for a newspaper, then we suddenly freak out, right? We have to change our mind set for what is actually valuable.”
Finneman has also successfully helped the Pinedale Roundup apply for a grant through the Wyoming Community Foundation Press Forward to hire a reporter intern for the summer, and is training O’Hare on how to start a newsletter so they can share breaking news more often.
Next, Finneman will help the paper start a reader’s board so they can continue to get input from the community. The consultation continues through the end of April but Finneman will continue to keep tabs on how the changes are improving the papers revenue over the next year.
Catch Open Spaces on April 10 to hear the full interview with O’Hare and Finneman.
