A long shot in trying to save local newspapers

Why can’t student newspapers and local newspapers work more closely together?

And let me clarify briefly: saying “local” I do mean small-town papers.  It’s uncertain in my mind if the same problems and benefits might apply to larger city papers, but I think the two kinds of publications actually have similar problems and coverage, and some sort of agreement could be mutually beneficial.

Reading over the newspapers I compared in my last post, the rural Whitman Pioneer and Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, I didn’t see a lot of overlap in coverage.  The stories I finally set upon to cover regarded swine flue preparedness, but I was ill-at-ease because the Pioneer focused on the Whitman health center with an angle towards the people already infected, and the UB focused on the Public Health Department’s reaction.  And they felt a little bit more like companion pieces — or even two halves of one story.

So it got me thinking; could we get some of these papers co-operating in an Associated Press-style bureau?  Think about the problem with smaller locals; I would say that their biggest flaw is that they are understaffed.  I can’t speak to the U-B, but I think that my hometown weekly has something like eight people working at it.  It’s not unusual to see every front page story have the same byline.

Locals could use student reporters to fill in some gaps in coverage.  The paper gets more stories, and the students get bylines.  Ideally, they’d also get paychecks, but perhaps at a reduced rate, or as a kind of internship.  There would have to be some system to make sure the students aren’t being exploited, but there’s no denying the fact that extra clips (and experience) is going to look good on a resume.

Similarly, it would give student papers a chance to cover things outside campus.  These sorts of generalizations don’t apply across the board, but I think it’s fair to say most college publications focus overwhelmingly on the school and not the little town outside of it.  There’s also a distinct advantage in having some professional oversight from a copyediting perspective.  Though that depends heavily on the quality of each respective paper, and the involvement of the student advisor — if one exists at all.

I’m being purposely vague on the nature of such a collaboration because I think every agreement between any of these organizations is going to have to be very carefully tailored to the situation.  But I’m envisioning something between an agreement to cross-publish certain prominent stories, and a full-on merger.

(The latter may actually be possible, but I think requires too delicate of a balance of power between students and pros to be that fruitful.  A student paper’s independence is an important lesson in its writer’s journalistic development, and there would be too great a possibility that the professionals could bully/exploit their junior partners in some way.  Plus, the student paper’s affiliation with it’s university may bring up some sort of legal issues, especially if they get money from the college).

Most importantly, it might be a way to revitalize lagging advertisers.  This could be — again, gotta be vague — something like a simple referral system or in the extreme as a full on partnership where ads run in both publications and the revenue is split via a ratio that reflects each publication’s respective circulation.  Advertisers will see that as having a few extra thousand people seeing their ads, and they might buy ads when they wouldn’t have before if they were concerned about the amount of people actually reading their ads.

On the other hand, it means that advertisers who might buy two ads — one in each paper — will only buy one, the result being halving the revenue.  Then again, if the papers were fully merged at that point, the cost that that might save could potentially be worth the decrease in revenue to which I just alluded.  But we’ve managed to wander in the miasma of speculation, from which I will now extract us by means of a non-committal, inconclusive segue:

Any kind of financial agreement is ultimately going to depend on the financial situation of the region, but if at the very least there will be some benefit in a combined team of sales representatives.

Because of the sensitivity of the information, I’d rather not comment on the specifics of the relationship between The Daily Campus and The Chronicle, our publisher and local newspaper, but I will say that it has always been both positive and fruitful, and I see no reason why any other student and local paper might have a different dynamic than that.

These are desperate times and there’s a power in numbers.  Why not start slow and see what develops?

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