A Golden Age for Community News?

I got my picture in the paper. And for a reporter, that’s never a good thing.

We’re never supposed to be part of the story, but there we were inside the Rocky Mountain News newsroom, just another batch of “victims” of the economic downturn and what some people were calling a wholesale collapse of the newspaper industry.

E.W. Scripps announced it was closing the Rocky just a few weeks before the paper’s 150th birthday. Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Judy DeHaas captured my watery eyes glistening. It landed on top of page seven in the farewell edition, and dozens upon dozens of people called, e-mailed or wrote letters expressing their sympathy.

But as I told people at the time, there’s a fine line between tears and a twinkle in one’s eye.

As heartbroken as I was that Scripps was closing our very special newspaper, I was not surprised. And, in truth, I had been preparing for that day for a long, long time.

For years, friends thought I was joking when I blustered about my ridiculous plans. When the last newspaper in America closes, I said, that’s when I plan to open my own newspaper.

When the Rocky Mountain News closed, I spent less than a week wondering if I might find another reporting job that would be half as interesting as the gig I had carved out at the Rocky. I was the Washington correspondent, and in those last eight years I covered the Sept. 11, 2001, disaster at the Pentagon, reported from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, spent more than a year chasing presidential candidates through Iowa and beyond, and had a third-row seat for President Obama’s inauguration. Was I going to find a job half that exciting? Probably not. Not in this market.

So one week after the Rocky closed, I hit the road and started kicking the tires at some quaint, little newspapers that were for sale all around the country. Some are profitable. Some are not. (Geography and local market economics have a lot to do with that.) Still, I saw potential everywhere I went.

Why? Because small-town newspapers use a business model that is like a miniature version of where the big-city newspapers are heading.

They are forced to stay within their means. They have tiny staffs – only what the day-to-day cash flow can sustain. They aren’t afraid of reader-generated content. They outsource many functions, such as printing and distribution. And, often by accident, they keep their communities addicted to the print product because they don’t give away a whole lot of material for free on the Internet.

In the end, I decided to move back to my home state of New Mexico, to the tiny town of Santa Rosa on Route 66. I plunked down a good chunk of my life’s savings, and since Aug. 1 I have been owner, managing editor and publisher of The Guadalupe County Communicator – the sixth-smallest weekly in the 36th most populous state.

It’s a ton of work, especially since I’m now doing the business-side work previously split between a husband-and-wife team at the same time I’m doing a lot of writing to go with the work of my lone staff reporter.

Still, this assignment is far more exciting than almost anything I’ve done at the big-city papers over the past 22 years. And guess what? The economics still work, even with what I admit is one of the more pathetic, ad-free Internet sites you can imagine.

But here’s the deal.

I believe in print journalism. And I believe that the future of print is print.

I don’t just say that for sentimental reasons. We all love the feel of a newspaper in our hands. We like turning pages while we sip our coffee. We don’t complain when the newsprint rubs off on our fingers. We like to clip things out, post them on the refrigerator under rainbow-colored alphabet magnets. We like to savor long stories by setting them aside to come back to, again and again. We like to save recipes and photographs in our scrapbooks.

But that’s all sentimental stuff.

On the business side, print journalism has a proven value to local readers and local advertisers. A community newspaper has a physical presence. It’s not faceless. It is accountable to the people who live next door. It connects one neighbor to the next. It reaches a small but clear set of households. And an advertiser wanting to reach those specific people can count upon it.

The Internet has many, many values. It can democratize information and expand the scope of storytelling in ways that past generations of reporters, photographers, editors, artists and publishers never imagined. Its potential reach is limitless. But that also makes it less valuable in some key ways. It is so vast, so fast-changing, so competitive, filled with such a vast array of choices for people with short attention spans, that no one Web site can reach virtually every member of a single community the way an anachronistic, ink-on-paper newspaper can.

Think of a community newspaper as a bronze statue in the town square. Everybody in town can look up and see that it’s there. Think of the Internet as a virtually unlimited file containing photographs of every monument on the whole planet. Now, if you’re an advertiser and you want to make sure that everyone in a three-mile radius sees your company’s name, you might try to put up a banner on or near the little statue in the town square. Millions of people worldwide might see that banner buried somewhere in the file of photographs of every monument on the whole planet. Might. But the people the advertiser really wants to reach will see it in person, there at the town square – or in the newspaper delivered at the doorstep.

That analogy might sound anachronistic, but hey, it still works – at least here in Santa Rosa. At least for now.

After the Rocky’s closure, my goal was to take an ordinary community paper, make strategic investments in improving its writing, photography, layout and market penetration, and then move on to experimenting with new business models that somehow might translate to a larger scale. The plans include a novel new Web site – one designed to bring in new readers and new advertisers without teaching local readers to stop reading the printed product. (We have an opportunity to do that, due to some unique features here like Route 66, camping and fishing tourism just outside town, and a one-of-a-kind desert scuba diving location called The Blue Hole.) Still, one of the biggest surprises in my first month as publisher is that the old, anachronistic business model works so well right now – the same way it has worked for decades.

Who knows? As corporations continue scaling back their newsrooms, idling hundreds upon hundreds of veteran reporters, photographers and artists, perhaps some of them will pause before giving up their callings to send resumes to public relations firms or academia. Maybe some of them will look outside the big cities and see if they can use their talents working for themselves out in the sticks. And maybe, just maybe, we’re at the start of a golden age of small town, community newspapering.

What can I say? A publisher can dream.

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M.E. Sprengelmeyer is former Washington correspondent for the Rocky Mountain News, and now managing editor and publisher of The Guadalupe County Communicator. He can be reached at ErstHap@hotmail.com.