Introducing the Nonprofit Newspaper Hybrid

The Clark Fork Chronicle, circulation 2,700, is just starting its fourth year. We are a typical community weekly, covering Montana’s State House District 14. Our readership area follows the Clark Fork River, winding through two counties, four school districts, four rural fire districts, two U.S. Forest Service ranger districts, two incorporated towns, nine zip codes, and seventeen voting precincts.

Jock Lauterer, author of the textbook Community Journalism, would recognize us as relentlessly local, focused on becoming the local experts on the public life of our area. Our typical front page has our top local hard news story, coverage of a local public meeting or event, a local feature story, and a feature photo of a local event – often a local child, a 50th wedding anniversary. Yep, we’re relentlessly local. We live here, our families live here—my wife’s grandma just turned 95—and we care.
There’s no real secret to what we do: We attend and report on as many local public meetings as we can and attend state and federal meetings when they are of interest to our readers. Schools are the heart of our communities, so we write as much as we can and encourage student contributions. We write about new and expanding local businesses, local residents and their achievements and milestones, local crimes and court cases, and we try to keep people informed about all the local private organizations: the anti-drug use groups, the chamber of commerce, the senior citizens. We started a church page to recap pastors’ messages. Our readership area includes a lot of public land so we also follow forest management, wildfires, and growth issues.

You wouldn’t think any of this would be worth discussing. But given that there are three other newspapers in the same readership area, it says a lot about the state of rural journalism that the Clark Fork Chronicle has grown steadily over its first four years.

Why have we succeeded? Why was this particular niche—providing local news—available for us to fill, especially when there was an existing long-established weekly already in the area?

Because the business model for rural newspapers no longer works.

We are in the midst of vast interconnected demographic and economic changes. We’ve seen our traditional natural resource industries decline and families move away in search of work. That has cut into our base of traditional advertisers—the local mom-and-pop stores. With folks now driving fifty to one-hundred miles to shop in the big-box stores, many of our rural areas are becoming outlying bedroom communities of the regional economic centers, with little local commerce of their own.

At the same time, many baby-boomers are retiring to the “third coast”—the Rocky Mountain states and especially western Montana—to enjoy recreation and wildlife on the vast neighboring public lands. Some are bringing their own money and businesses with them, but many of those businesses, enabled by the Internet and low-cost communications, operate in markets elsewhere in the country and the world. They don’t need to advertise in their local community newspaper.

If the pure commercial model worked, small-town weeklies would be thriving. But not many are, especially those with distant ownership. If you study rural newspapers owned by out-of-town interests, you find advertisements from other towns, other counties, other states. The reporters’ names in the staff boxes change every six to eight months as the companies reduce salaries to the point where young journalism grads can’t afford both food and gas.

Other changes are more subtle but can be summed up in four words: fewer stories, bigger pictures. Over time, the editorial choices start to tilt toward stories and photos intended to move papers off the drugstore racks: wrecks, crime, conflict.

To keep a newspaper alive under a strict commercial model in an economically depressed rural county, the formula is too often to reduce costs and increase revenues. I know of one rural weekly that even tried to charge for a correction, offering ad space to the offended party rather than a mea culpa.

The danger of operating under that old business model in a new economy is that many rural newspapers could enter what University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer calls the “death spiral”: As the managers of regional chains cut costs by reducing the local news staff, the resulting drop in quality reduces circulation, which leads to more cost-cutting, which leads to lower circulation, more cost-cutting, and so on.

John Q. Murray is publisher of the Clark Fork Chronicle and a graduate student at the University of Montana, pursuing a Master of Public Administration degree. For more information about the non-profit Corporation for Public Community Newspapers, see the website http://www.publicnewspapers.org. The Clark Fork Chronicle website is http://www.clarkforkchronicle.com.