News / Clark County News

From the Newsroom: Seeing the light, at last

By Craig Brown, Columbian Editor

Published: August 27, 2022, 6:02am

Now that life is returning a little more to normal, I’m getting a few requests to speak to small groups about the state of the newspaper industry in general and The Columbian in particular. I’m a better writer than speaker, so I decided to write down my thoughts and share them with you.

The newspaper industry has been “in transition” for at least 15 years. The transition was forced upon us by the colossus that is the internet, aided by its sidekick, the smartphone.

Of course, this is not the first time a new technology has crept into newspapers’ territory. A hundred years ago, they said radio would make newspapers obsolete. Seventy years ago, they said TV would put us in our grave. Both were speed bumps compared with the internet.

Our industry used to get about 75 percent of its revenue through advertising. But the rise of internet shopping and social media turned a $49.4 billion newspaper advertising market in 2005 into a $9.6 billion market in 2020, according to the nonprofit Pew Research Group. That’s an 80 percent decline!

So it should be no surprise that 3,000 U.S. newspapers have closed since 2004, including 360 just since the pandemic started. And those that have hung on, including The Columbian, have cut costs by laying off staff, dropping print frequency, reducing page sizes and more.

That’s the bad news. It’s behind us. Maybe there is more bad news ahead. I don’t know. But I do see a future for The Columbian and for the industry.

It’s because people still want local news. Government spokespeople, politically motivated “pink slime” websites and social media gossip have tried to fill the news void, but consumers are smarter than that. They want quality journalism. That’s why The Columbian today reaches about 300,000 people each week. That’s our biggest audience ever.

The challenge for us, and others, is to build this audience into regular, paying customers. Most of the folks we reach today are subscribing to our newsletters, following us on social media, and using all of the free views they get on our website every 30 days. We need their credit cards.

We are making some headway here, and we have acquired new software that will help us analyze reading habits, refine our platforms and content, and make better offers to customers and would-be customers. If you work in product marketing, your company has probably done this for years. But it is relatively new in the news industry.

A lot of this effort falls outside the newsroom. But for the newsroom, I see two main challenges:

First, we need to meet the audience where and when they want to meet us. Some customers still want a printed newspaper delivered to their home. Others want to look at us every day on their desktop or notebook computer. An increasing number want to see everything on their smartphone. And the time of day they want to look at us varies: first thing in the morning; when they get to the office; after supper; or anytime we let them know there’s a big breaking story.

Our strategies for accomplishing this goal include our seven free newsletters; our presence on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and other social media; “push” notifications; and, of course, our ePaper, mobile app, website and printed newspaper. We have at least 10 different ways you can interact with us!

Our second challenge is to create unique, engaging journalism that matters. A lot of what passes for “Clark County news” on TV and other websites is merely press releases from police, fire and government agencies. We report that, too.

But the “why” and “how” are also important. That’s where a robust newsroom’s skeptical eye comes in. Thanks to donors to our Community Funded Journalism initiative, we have recently added three reporting positions to our staff covering homeless, affordable housing and transportation issues, with a particular emphasis on the Interstate 5 Bridge replacement project. They join what was already Southwest Washington’s biggest news staff.

Local journalism has been bent, folded, stapled and mutilated. But we haven’t been broken. With our community’s support, we’ll continue to tell our community’s stories in ways that reach modern audiences.

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