A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

daily newspaper when Advance Publications, Inc., shut down the Ann Arbor News July
23, 2009 after 174 years in business. 30 So far, Morgan and her husband, Dave Askins,
have been able to keep their Ann Arbor Chronicle going and the mortgage current on
their house on Ann Arbor’s Old West Side. Morgan described doing so as “a huge and
constant concern” and said she’s lost 50 pounds in the process. “It’s very different than
thinking about journalism in the abstract,” she said during a late evening interview
before hopping on her red Ruckus scooter for the ride home. 31
Philip Balboni, who co‐founded the GlobalPost international news site earlier this
year, said: “I feel as if I’ve been handed the greatest distribution platform in human
history.” In an interview at his offices overlooking Boston Harbor, he added: “All I have
to do is make it a business.” 32
In Pittsburgh, the 223‐year‐old Post‐Gazette faces much the same challenge on a local
level. “We can’t perform our civic duty if we underperform financially,” editor David
Shribman said in a telephone conversation about the paper’s new revenue prospects.
“It’s a lesson every editor didn’t think he or she had to learn—but has learned over the
last year or two. We can worry no less about covering the news, but we have to worry
about a lot more stuff than we ever did before.” 33
Not All the Old Stuff Is Broken
For all the gloom, not all the old stuff is broken, and that complicates the problem
even more. Despite unfavorable trend lines, more than half of the nation’s 1,400 daily
newspapers are still profitable. Even if advertising as we know it won’t be around much
longer, there are still a lot of merchants buying space in their hometown dailies to alert
readers to this week’s big sale. Most newspapers report that their print products are still
generating 80 to 90 percent of their revenues. 34
So much for a simple approach of “out with the old and in with the new.” Instead,
legacy news organizations need transitional frameworks that draw sufficient revenue
from a combination of old and new lines of business to remain viable during the search
for future models. News executives are struggling to learn a delicate dance: how to
move with users to emerging publishing environments at a pace that preserves as much
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