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

decision to defend the old model you may be handicapping the new one. And while the
[print circulation] you protect will save the newspaper money, it will not save the
newspaper.”
New Charges for New Services
Other experiments involve paid sites providing content and services not available
either in the paper or on the paper’s Web site.
Jim O’Shea, the former Los Angeles Times editor who now heads the start‐up Chicago
News Cooperative, makes a point of insisting that the $2 weekly fee he envisions
charging “is not fee for content.” The Co‐op, launched in the fall of 2009, provides
content for a regional edition of The New York Times as well as its own Web site, where
stories are freely available to all.
But O’Shea hopes membership in the co‐op will provide sufficient additional
benefits—beyond the news itself—to support the fee he describes as “less than a cup of
Starbucks.” Within five years, he hopes to support an annual newsroom budget of $3 to
$4 million by collecting those two dollars a week from 30,000 to 40,000 people—about
one half of one percent of the population of metropolitan Chicago. But before he can get
to the stage of seeking those co‐op fees, he says he needs an additional $2 million in
philanthropic help to sustain the operation in the meantime.
The co‐op model is at the heart of an ambitious plan developed by veteran journalist
Tom Stites to create a news service aimed at “less‐than‐affluent Americans” in
communities around the country. Like the Chicago News Co‐op, Stites’ Banyan Project
would not sell its journalism but rather the online community services it would create
around the news—its benefits of ownership. Also still in the stages of seeking foundation
funding to get started, Stites hopes for a half million shareholders who, at “a dime a
day,” could generate annual revenues of $18 million. 62
The key to the Banyan’s strategy is an approach to news and users that Stites
describes as “relational journalism.” He explains: “It’s the relational approach that
makes possible Banyan’s value proposition—that the less‐than‐affluent Banyan public
will find its journalism relevant to their lives, respectful of them as people, and worthy
of their trust. Consumer co‐op ownership is at the heart of this in that it makes the
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