Many local newspapers that close their doors do so because key personnel (the publisher, the main news reporter, etc.) decide they can’t or don’t want to keep going, for whatever reason.
For publications that want to continue even in the face of retirements or diminished staff capacity, the main option at that point is to find a buyer that can bring them in to a larger network of papers, and the shared resources that go with that.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but often comes with big changes and can be seen as an “ending” in itself, the end of truly local ownership and control based in the community the paper covers. And of course in many cases it has meant that the local coverage eventually dries up.
I’ve been wondering if there’s another option that could help keep more newspapers from closing or selling.
Local newsroom service centers
What if there were an option for shared resources that doesn’t require a paper to give up its ownership in order to make use of it? Could there be a “helpdesk for local newspapers” structure and client/service model that contributed to staffing/resource capacity for newspapers on an as-needed basis?
It could include some obvious things like:
- IT support and software tool/integration development
- Legal support (this already exists to a degree in various orgs that provide pro bono legal resources for journalists)
- Copy editing
- Page layout
- Website/CMS management
- Administrative and financial help
- HR and payroll functions
If organized as regional service centers, they could also provide services that have some local flavor:
- Facilitating public notice / legal advertising orders and publication claims
- Compiling data for regionally relevant stories
- Tracking how emerging state legislation will affect the publication and its readers
- Coordinating backup options for printing, distribution, retail sales management, etc.
All of these would give local newsrooms the option to devote more of their team’s limited time to the tasks and coverage that benefit most from having local staff doing them, and the option to shift some important operational work to folks who still very much understand how the local news publishing business works, but who don’t require as much local context to be effective.
Traveling temporary publishers
Beyond that, I imagine that one of these service providers could offer more significant embedded services that help local newspapers remain sustainable and viable.
For example, when I meet up with other publishers and newsroom leaders, I see that most everyone is on the edge of burnout. They can only do that for so long, and it’s understandable when they have to move on.
As a publisher and managing editor myself who can rarely take a vacation where I can truly step away from the day-to-day of the paper, I’ve dreamed of being able to call in someone from a reserve pool of publishers/managing editors, who have at least regional context and experience, to take over for me for a week or two. (I could certainly ask my colleagues to handle new things in my absence, or just declare that those things will be paused until I return, but neither option is ideal.)
Would a traveling, temporary staffing model work for publishers, reporters, newspaper administrators and other roles the same way it works for nurses, doctors and other first responders? If we could give some of our local newsroom folks a real break now and then, would it mean less burnout and fewer newspapers closing their doors due to the loss of key personnel?
How to fund it
When it comes to how the economics of this service would work, I think it could rely on service fees — maybe a base monthly fee to participate and then add-on costs based on the services actually used — but this also seems like an area that grant funders would want to look at. Funding the operations of a service center that helps tens or hundreds of local newsrooms work more effectively and sustainably over time would be appealing.
There would be plenty of details to figure out. How does the service center expand and contract its capacity on demand? How are the traveling staffers selected in a way that newsrooms could plug them in with 100% confidence? How “regional” is too regional, i.e. when do you start to lose the local flavor and context needed for local news production, and it just starts to turn into a global contracting service like Upward? How to ensure a newsroom’s internal tools and process line up in some basic ways with what the service center teams can work with remotely? Confidentiality and avoiding conflicts of interest would be key. And so on.
But as a model, this feels better to me than some of the duplicative investments currently being made in local news publishing infrastructure and that time and energy that requires from everyone involved.
It’s building centralized water and plumbing infrastructure instead of everyone figuring out their own rain barrels and outhouses.
It’s building a library staffed with expert resource librarians who remember what you like to read, instead of everyone having to own and update a collection of books and reference materials.
Feedback requested
What do you think? Is this feasible? Desirable? Worth pursuing?
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