How long would your place of employment last if you sold your products or services for 18 cents a day?
It’s a ridiculous question – and yet that’s what the public expects the news industry to do.
Recently, a Kansas weekly newspaper calculated that it cost $3.03 to produce one printed newspaper. Its customers were paying $1.26 a week for it.
It doesn’t take a genius to know that isn’t a model to stay in business. It’s a holdover from 1833 when the news industry decided to start selling newspapers for a penny and to rely heavily on advertising. This simply no longer works in 2023.
So, like the grocery store, the gas station and virtually every other business that has existed the past two years, the paper decided to adjust prices for inflation and, you know, try to stay in business.
Now the paper costs – gasp – 40 cents a day. In layman’s terms, that’s $12 a month.
Let the pearl clutching begin.
One woman, let’s call her Karen, felt the need to immediately pick up the phone and declare she would not be resubscribing at such a price.
I wonder if she made the same phone calls when the cost of eggs, gas, and Starbucks went up.
I’d bet in Vegas that she did not. Why do that when you can faint over a $12 newspaper bill instead?
In the past few years, I’ve done a significant amount of research related to local news. Over 2,000 newspapers are no longer in business anymore because they kept clinging to a 200-year-old business model that no longer works in 2023 by selling a product for pennies.
Eudora knows full well what it’s like to not have a regular newspaper presence and then to have one again. A newspaper makes a difference in a community. And $12 to have someone sit at City Hall and school board on your behalf, to take the photos of local kids that makes any parent proud, to get to know the businesses coming in and to feel part of a community – we feel that’s a pretty reasonable investment.
It’s why we also need you to do your part to keep local news in town.
We have full-time staffers for the first time with Jack and Sara right now. They have rent to pay and groceries to buy like everyone else. (Disclaimer: I do not take any of the Eudora Times revenue for myself as editor/publisher.)
We need two things to support our reporters.
1. We need you (and your friends) to sign up for our e-newsletter. You get the pop-up every time you go on our website. Put your email in the blank and then check your spam when it asks you to confirm if you want to sign up.
The newsletter is free and delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. This matters so that we can generate advertising support. It matters because Facebook hates the news industry and rarely puts our content in people’s screens anymore. If you want to get local news, we need you to sign up for our e-newsletter.
2. We need you to become members in our partnership. We are 100% donation funded and need consistent monthly support for our reporters. We need you to go to this site, click the ongoing gift button and commit to giving us $10 per month to serve this community. In return, you get not only local news but also a tax break since the money goes into our account at KU Endowment. And we can stay in business.
In the coming weeks and months, you will see additional events and services that we begin to offer as well to modernize our business model so we can stay operating.
It’s the result of an 18-month research experiment I just did that encouraged the above Kansas weekly to increase their prices and form a strong e-newsletters, memberships and events program.
For now, we’re not asking for much. At $10 a month, that’s 33 cents a day so Jack can show up at your kid’s event. It’s 33 cents a day so Sara can be the public’s representative at school board and City Hall.
It’s nothing to clutch pearls over. It’s what’s needed to serve a community.
Teri Finneman is executive editor and publisher of The Eudora Times as well as a journalism professor at KU.
