For at least 10 years, all of the journalism experts and academics have been telling newspaper editors, “Put digital first!” I don’t disagree with that, and we have done a lot already. Next week we’ll be taking another trip down that highway, one that may be noticed by our print readers.
We’re going to present the bulk of our news first online, and then put the stories in the printed paper at the next convenient opportunity. Although it requires quite a bit of work flow reinvention and deadline changes in the newsroom, there are going to be benefits for both our digital audience and our print audience.
Digital customers will find more local news presented throughout the day, with an emphasis on having new content at times people like to be on our website. Currently, most of our stories that fall outside the breaking news category are posted in two waves. One is at 6 a.m., and the other is around dinnertime. I don’t know about you, but those are not the times I am most likely to be looking at columbian.com.
In print, we’re going to move the local news to the front of the A section, followed by the editorial page and then the nation/world news. This is going to be a lot more logical than our current arrangement of top local stories on the front page, followed by nation/world news, followed by the editorial page and then the rest of the local news. Since all the local news will be together, we can drop that “Clark County” banner to give us more room.
Frankly, our current arrangement is left over from when we used to publish a four-section newspaper on weekdays. When we combined sections during the COVID-19 pandemic, we didn’t want to make too many changes at once. Now, by putting the local news in front, we’ll be following the same pattern used by most of our peers, including the papers in Everett, Tacoma and Olympia, as well as Salem and Eugene in Oregon.
We aren’t making any changes to our Saturday print edition. All the sections will remain as is, including the standalone Clark County section. Keeping things this way will allow us to continue printing multiple in-depth stories.
So why should we put digital first? Are we just kowtowing to fashion? A look at our circulation data provides an instant answer. Like virtually every other printed newspaper in the United States, The Columbian’s print circulation continues to ebb as the core newspaper audience fades. On the other hand, younger audiences are subscribing to our digital products. We now have considerably more digital subscribers than print, and we see the potential to continue to attract more paid digital customers.
Some of the ways to attract these digital subscribers is to meet them on social media. We have about 62,000 Facebook followers, more than 47,000 on X (formerly Twitter) and another 17,000 on Instagram. We’re on TikTok and YouTube, and have a lot of free newsletters that, combined, reach a lot more people than ever subscribed to our newspaper.
The key is to get more of these social media followers to become paid customers, and offering our best local content online in a timely manner seems like the best way to do it.
Finally, there is a non-newsroom operational benefit to this change: We’ll be able to consolidate our two press shifts into one day shift. We hope this will make it easier to attract and retain experienced offset press operators. Like other trades, offset printing has more journey-level workers retiring than trainees entering. It’s very difficult to find the people we need to operate two pressroom shifts, particularly when one runs late into the evening.
Once we make the change, I think everyone will be happy. But next week is going to be challenging, as we shift deadlines and change the ways news budgets are kept. I’ll let you know how it goes!
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