The project
In 1999, eight residents of Port Hope, Ontario, passed a hat in a bar. They collected $800 to publish a pamphlet telling their neighbours that Port Hope deserved a better newspaper. Among them were author Farley Mowat; a professor of journalism; and a popular science writer. That pamphlet turned into a monthly not-for-profit newspaper, showing how a group of people dedicated to their community could chart a new path in the failing news publishing business.
For years, newspapers were essentially cash cows. The work of gathering and writing news, publishing it and distributing it was funded by revenue from three major sources: advertising, subscriptions and classified advertisements. The information age has permanently changed that. News is now available free on the internet, eroding subscription bases. Cheap classified services such as Craigslist are eating into newspapers’ profit share. The dip in print advertising, as audiences fragment and advertising on the internet grows, was evident before the current economic downturn, and has only gotten worse. Such stalwarts as Tribune Co. – publisher of Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times – are filing for bankruptcy and Detroit papers are cutting back on home delivery. There is a real chance some prominent news outlets will be lost in 2009.
Newspapers have been remarkably slow to change in the face of a shifting marketplace, but that is rapidly becoming unavoidable. They need not, however, move off into uncharted territories. Across Canada and around the world, entrepreneurs and news hounds are doing innovative things in an attempt to keep the industry afloat, to connect with their neighbours or to cash in where possible. The news will only continue to be bad for mainstream newspapers. It’s time for them to learn from these innovators. The stories are plentiful. From Mowat and his friends to San Francisco-based David Cohn whose crowdfunding project lets readers vote with their dollars to get writers to cover particular topics, papers have a lot to learn from the grass roots.
We propose to write a book using case studies to examine potential new business cases for newspapers. While some of these stories have been told individually, no one has brought them together as we will. Mowat’s quintessentially Canadian story of newspapering in Port Hope has never before been told.
As journalists, it is painful to watch the industry woefully ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of the future and, increasingly, the present. But the questions and answers we will address impact more than those employed in the news industry. If newspapers are a key component of democracy, if they reflect our ideas, our interests and our challenges in any way, if they serve to bind communities, then the question of how they will survive in this business landscape is one that touches us all.
Chen-Wing has been involved in journalism since the early days of the web. He started and ran a popular news website before such things were in vogue, and is currently a copy editor at the Waterloo Region Record. Konieczna is a reporter and blogger at the Guelph Mercury, and is taking eight months off to write wherever her heart takes her before starting a PhD in journalism this fall.