'Digital' isn't the answer to rural journalism's problems

And, boy, community newspaper owners, publishers and general managers need to hear that.

In fact, to state it again?

Community newspaper owners, publishers and general managers need to hear that.

So, hear it! 

From the Community Journalism Project:

To me, this is spot-on. 

Quick takeaways:

1. Community newspapers are ever-more stretched out. Asking them to do yet more with less is just no bueno.

2. Are you doing renewal postcards for subscribers and other "hygiene"? (Ten percent — I would have guessed more — have past due subscribers, 90 days or more past.) Without embedding this one, here's a related CJP video about retention strategies in particular. In basic, it notes about 65 percent of people renew automatically to the community paper, about 5 percent you lose, and so you need to focus on retaining 30 percent or so.

3. Have you thought about outsourcing some of this "hygiene" to folks like CJP?

4. The meat of the webinar is IF you have people who want something digital, how to offer something without cannibalizing the print newspaper. Related to that is, if you have digital customers, doing the digital version of "hygiene."

On point 4, what I relate to is, as "no DeJoy in Mudville" continues to raise USPS rates, using digital to target out-of-county readers who are move-aways but might have grandkids who live locally and want to see them in sports pictures, etc.

They also note that digital should NOT be seen as a way of "converting" subscribers there to print.

Now, that said, CJP did not offer prices for its services at the end of the piece. 

They do talk about managing rate increases on this, but it seems that they're only talking about subscription rates. The elephant in the room, of course, for many smaller community papers, is advertising rates.

OTOH, some of it seems out-of-date. They talk about somebody at the high school football game posting score updates from a smartphone to the company website. Really? You're competing with Facebook pages, Dave Campbell's website here in Texas, and other things.

And, if you're a publisher who isn't comfortable with at least the basics of a Blox-based website, and isn't comfortable asking a staff member to do that, you should maybe ask whether you shouldn't be paying CPJ to do this.

But, back on the good side, they say don't overpay for digital bells and whistles if you don't know how to use it. And, boy, this is true. 

Back more to No. 4. If you're part of a group of anything more than three-four local newspapers, much of this can be done at the corporate level. Any group of half a dozen or more papers, and definitely 10 or more, whether having a presence of moderate, modest or none digitally, and whatever they're behind on, on print "hygiene," should have a dedicated staffer at corporate level. If there's no single corporate office, run it out of the largest newspaper in ownership and bill out prorated charges.