Damian Radcliffe

Searching for Sheboygans: On the future of small market newspapers:

This article addresses the knowledge gap regarding small market newspapers in the United States. We address a deceptively simple research question: what is the state of small market newspapers in the United States as seen through the eyes of practitioners and industry experts? Based on in-depth interviews with experts and practitioners, we argue for a more nuanced vocabulary to describe newspapers and local news. Grouping all newspapers into a monolithic industry – as general sector analyses often do – suggests a homogeneous experience. That is not the case. Smaller publications face their own challenges and opportunities, and they define success and innovation on their own terms. This reality needs to be better understood.

Local News in a Digital World: Small-Market Newspapers in the Digital Age

Too often we tend to hear one single narrative about the state of newspapers in the United States. The newspaper industry is not one sector. While there are considerable variances between the myriad of outlets — whether national titles, major metros, dailies in large towns, alt weeklies, publications in rural communities, ethnic press, and so on — a major challenge for anyone trying to make sense of industry data is its aggregated nature. It’s nearly impossible to deduce trends or characteristics at a more granular level. The story of local newspapers with circulations below 50,000, or what we call “small-market newspapers,” tends to get overlooked due to the narrative dominance of larger players. However, small-market publications represent a major cohort that we as a community of researchers know very little about, and a community of practitioners that too often — we were told — knows little about itself. Our study seeks to help redress this recent imbalance. We embarked on our research with a relatively simple yet ambitious research question: How are small-market newspapers responding to digital disruption? From the data collected in our research, we also strove to report on the future of small-market newspapers by asking: How can small-market newspapers best prepare for the future? Our research findings are based on interviews with fifty-three experts from across the publishing industry, academia, and foundations with a strong interest in the local news landscape. So as to make a fair assessment of the topic’s placement against a wider news background, we did not limit ourselves just to those with immediate connection to small-market newspapers. From these conversations and our own analysis, seven key themes emerged.

Practicing Engagement: Participatory journalism in the Web 2.0 era

In recent years, the rapid expansion of Web 2.0 tools has opened new possibilities for audience participation in news, while “engagement” has become a media industry buzzword. In this study, we explore approaches to engagement emerging in the field based on in-depth interviews with editors at a range of news outlets from several countries, and we map these approaches onto the literature on participatory journalism and related innovations in journalism practice. Our findings suggest variation in approaches to engagement that can be arrayed along several related dimensions, encompassing how news outlets measure and practice it (e.g. with the use of quantitative audience metrics methods), whether they think about audiences as more passive or more active users, the stages at which they incorporate audience data or input into the news product, and how skeptically or optimistically they view the audience. Overall, while some outlets are experimenting with tools for more substantive audience contributions to news content, we find few outlets approaching engagement as a way to involve users in the creation of news, with most in our sample focusing mostly on engaging users in back-end reaction and response to the outlet’s content. We identify technological, economic, professional, and organizational factors that shape and constrain how news outlets practice “engagement.”

The Digital Life of Small Market Newspapers: Results from a multi-method study

The established narrative around newspapers and their relationship with “digital” is predominantly gloomy. We’ve learned how newspapers missed the mark regarding digital distribution and how traditional working practices often led to slow adoption of digital tools. There’s merit in this, yet it is not the entire story. We are missing insights into the smallest newspapers. This paper contributes to this conversation through an investigation into the digital life of small market newspapers. We conducted a multi-method study drawing on in-depth interviews with experts and practitioners, and a survey of journalists and editors at small market newspapers. Our findings point to considerable variety of experience. It is crucial not to discount these experiments, or fall victim to the assumption of digital backwardness and analog quaintness we often equate with small towns and smaller publications.

Life at Small-Market Newspapers: Results from a Survey of Small Market Newsrooms

The observations in this paper are based on the results of an online survey conducted between Monday, November 14 and Sunday, December 4, 2016. Survey respondents identified a number of key challenges for the sector, including: Shrinking newsrooms: More than half (59 percent) of our survey participants told us that the number of staff in their newsroom had shrunk since 2014. Recruitment: Low pay, long hours, and limited opportunities for career progression can impede the attraction and retention of young journalists. A long-hours culture: Many respondents reported that they regularly work more than 50 hours a week. Job security: Just over half of respondents (51 percent) said they feel secure in their positions. A further 29 percent had a neutral view (neither positive nor negative) about their job security. Despite these considerations, we encountered a sense of optimism among much of our sample. This confidence is rooted in an understanding that small-market newspapers are often close to their communities — with journalists sharing similar goals and lives to their audience — and a recognition that much of their reporting is not replicated elsewhere. Nevertheless, respondents were also aware of emerging issues, such as establishing relevancy with the next generation of news consumers. Social media and emerging storytelling formats such as live video may help do this, and we found strong levels of interest in some of these spaces. Subsequently, we believe a more nuanced conversation about this sector in required. The newspaper industry, even within this smaller stratum of newspapers, is far from homogeneous. Our conversations with local journalists found a cohort eager to know more about the experiences of their peers. As a result, we welcome moves to increase coverage of the local media sector by leading trade publications. Richer coverage and research of this industry will help to inform and inspire local journalists, policymakers, and funders alike.