The Digital Life of Small Market Newspapers

Abstract

The established narrative around newspapers and their relationship with “digital” is predominantly gloomy. We’ve learned how newspapers missed the mark regarding digital distribution and how traditional working practices often led to slow adoption of digital tools. There’s merit in this, yet it is not the entire story. We are missing insights into the smallest newspapers. This paper contributes to this conversation through an investigation into the digital life of small market newspapers. We conducted a multi-method study drawing on in-depth interviews with experts and practitioners, and a survey of journalists and editors at small market newspapers. Our findings point to considerable variety of experience. It is crucial not to discount these experiments, or fall victim to the assumption of digital backwardness and analog quaintness we often equate with small towns and smaller publications.

Keywords:

• local newspapers
• digital journalism
• online news
• small market newspapers
• local news
• local journalism

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Tow Center for Digital Journalism for funding this research, Dr. Nora Draper for her insightful suggestions on an earlier draft, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 As Powers (2018) observes “digital disruption has taken an immense toll on local journalism.”

2 A separate, stand-alone paper detailed the results of the interviews (Ali et al. 2018).

3 At the time of our interview, the Herald and News was owned by Pioneer News Group.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Tow Center for Digital journalism under Grant Number GR-2014-49899.

Notes on contributors

Christopher Ali

Christopher Ali (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Department of Media Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. E-mail: [email protected]

Thomas R. Schmidt

Thomas R. Schmidt, Department of Communication, Boise State University, Boise, Idaho. E-mail: [email protected].

Damian Radcliffe

Damian Radcliffe, School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. E-mail: [email protected]

Rosalind Donald

Rosalind Donald, School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York, New York. E-mail: [email protected]