Author: Kathryn Jones Malone

Here's a list of the newspapers that have sent staff members to our workshops over the years:

1. Advocate magazines
2. Albany News
3. Alpine Avalanche
4. Alpine Daily Planet
5. Archer County Advocate
6. Argyle Sun
7. Athens Daily Review
8. Austin Community Newspapers
9. Azle News
10. Bandera Bulletin
11. Bastrop Advertiser
12. Bay City Tribune
13. Baylor County Banner
14. Baytown Sun
15. Beeville Bee-Picayune
16. Big Lake Wildcat
17. Big Sandy and Hawkins Journal
18. Blanco County News
19. Boerne Star
20. Bowie News
21. Brackett News
22. Brady Standard-Herald
23. Breckenridge American
24. Bridgeport Index
25. Brownfield News
26. Bryan-College Station Eagle
27. Buffalo Press
28. Bullard Banner News
29. Burleson Star
30. Burnet Bulletin
31. Cameron Herald
32. Canadian Record
33. Canyon News
34. Carrizo Springs Javelin
35. Cass County Sun
36. Castroville News Bulletin
37. Cedar Creek Pilot
38. Cedar Park Citizen
39. Cherokeean Herald
40. Clarendon Enterprise
41. Clarksville Times
42. Claude News
43. Clay County Leader
44. Colorado City Record
45. Comanche Chief
46. Commerce Journal
47. Community News (Aledo)
48. Cooper Review
49. Corsicana Daily Sun
50. Daily Court Review
51. Daily Sentinel
52. Daily Sentinel (Nacogdoches)
53. Daily Tribune
54. Dalhart Texan
55. De Leon Monitor
56. Deer Park Broadcaster/Progress
57. Del Rio News-Herald
58. DeLeon Free Press
59. Denison/Pottsboro Press
60. Diboll Free Press
61. Dillard Newspapers
62. Dripping Springs Century-News
63. Dublin Citizen
64. Eagle Press
65. Eastland County News
66. El Campo Leader-News
67. Ellis County Press
68. Ennis Daily News
69. Everman Star
70. Examiner (Navasota)
71. Farmersville Times
72. Fayette County Record
73. Focus Daily News
74. Fort Worth Business Press
75. Franklin News Weekly
76. Frankston Citizen
77. Fredericksburg Standard-Radio Post
78. Freestone County Times
79. Gatesville Messenger
80. Gladewater Mirror
81. Glen Rose Reporter
82. Golden Gazette
83. Goldthwaite Eagle
84. Gonzales Cannon
85. Graham Leader
86. Grand Prairie Reporter
87. Granite Publications
88. Grapeland Messenger
89. Hansford County Reporter-Statesman
90. Hawley Voice
91. Hays Free Press
92. Hereford Brand
93. Highland Lakes Newspapers
94. Highlander
95. Hometown News & Riesel Rustler
96. Hondo Anvil Herald
97. Hood County News
98. Huntsville Item
99. Idalou Beacon
100. Irving Rambler
101. Island Moon
102. Jacksboro Newspapers
103. Jackson County Herald-Tribune
104. Jacksonville Daily Progress
105. Jefferson Jimplecute
106. Jewett Messenger
107. Jewish Herald-Voice
108. Joshua Star
109. Junction Eagle
110. Katy Times
111. Kaufman County Life
112. Kaufman Herald
113. Keene Star
114. Kerens Tribune
115. Kerrville Daily Times
116. Kilgore News Herald
117. Killeen Daily Herald
118. Kingsland Current
119. Kirbyville Banner
120. Knox County News
121. Kyle-Buda Eagle
122. Lake Country Sun
123. Lake Travis View
124. Lampasas Dispatch Record
125. Leonard Graphic
126. Light and Champion
127. Lindsay Letter
128. Little Elm Journal
129. Lockhart Post-Register
130. Lufkin Daily News
131. Madisonville Meteor
132. Malakoff News
133. Martin County Messenger
134. Medina Valley Times
135. Midland Reporter-News
136. Motley County Tribune
137. Mount Vernon Optic-Herald
138. Mountain Sun
139. Muenster Enterprise
140. Munday Courier
141. Murphy Monitor
142. Navarro County Times
143. Newton County News
144. Nocona News
145. North Lake Travis Log
146. Oak Cliff People
147. Olney Enterprise
148. Palestine Herald Press
149. Pampa News
150. Panhandle Press Association
151. Paris News
152. Patriot Talon (UT Tyler)
153. People Newspapers (Dallas)
154. Pflugerville Pflag
155. Picayune and River Cities Daily Tribune
156. Pilot Point Post-Signal
157. Plainview Daily Herald
158. Pleasanton Express
159. Polk County Enterprise
160. Port Aransas South Jetty
161. Port Arthur News
162. Port Lavaca Wave
163. Prime Time Newspapers
164. Princeton Herald
165. Progress Times
166. Quad City Messenger
167. Rains County Leader
168. Raymond Chronicle and Willacy County News
169. Red Oak Record
170. Red River Reporter
171. Rix Quinn Communications
172. Rockdale Reporter
173. Round Rock Leader
174. Sachse News
175. San Angelo Standard-Times
176. Sanger Courier
177. Sealy News
178. Seminole Sentinel
179. Silsbee Bee
180. Smithville Times
181. Stamford American
182. Star Group Newspapers
183. Stonewall County Courier
184. Suburbia News
185. Sulphur Springs News-Telegram
186. Sun Newspapers
187. Swisher County News
188. Tawakoni News
189. Taylor Daily Press
190. TCU Daily Skiff
191. Teague Chronicle
192. Terrell Tribune
193. Texas Community Newspaper Association
194. Texas Jewish Post
195. Texas Press Association
196. Texoma Enterprise
197. The Facts (Clute)
198. The Grizzly Detail
199. The Informador
200. The Island Moon (Corpus Christi)
201. The Shorthorn
202. Throckmorton Tribune
203. Today’s Catholic
204. Trammel Trace Tribune
205. Vernon Daily Record
206. Waco Tribune-Herald
207. Wallis News-Review
208. Waxahachie Daily Light
209. Weatherford Democrat
210. Weimar Mercury
211. West Austin News
212. West Kerr Current
213. Western Observer
214. Westlake Picayune
215. Wharton Journal Spectator
216. White Oak High School Gauger
217. White Rock Lake Weekly
218. Whitesboro News-Record
219. Whitewright Sun
220. Wilson County News
221. Wimberley View
222. Winnsboro News
223. Wise County Messenger
224. Wood County Democrat
225. Wylie News
226. Yoakum Herald Times
227. Zapata County News

OK, you need some good news amidst all the gloom and doom about newspapers.  We had to go to England to get it, but here it is:  A study in Great Britain said that newspapers have one major advantage – consumers trust us more than any other medium.  And in community journalism, where people actually run into us at the Little League game or singing in the church choir or buying nails at the hardware store, there’s probably more trust than what showed up in the Brits’ study.  The research showed that 66 percent trust newspaper advertising as “informative and confidence inspiring,” vs. just 44 percent who feel that way about TV and only 12 percent who’d agree to that for Internet advertising.

Well, Chicken Little, the sky could indeed be falling. So reports Alan Mutter in his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog. Mutter is reporting NAA figures that actually passed along the “good news” that newspaper sales were off 23.7 percent in the final quarter of the year. That’s the good news? It is when you consider the fact that sales were off 28.3 percent in the first quarter, 29 percent in the second, and 29.9 percent in the third. So 23.7 percent is looking pretty good now, huh? Mutter says: “If the rate of decay continues to slow in 2010, the industry will shrink at a slower pace than it did last year. But it still will continue to shrink. And declining shrinkage should not be taken as a sign of health.”

William Durant didn’t like automobiles.

Durant, who was in the carriage business in the 1890s, thought cars were smelly and noisy, not to mention downright dangerous.  But he realized that automobiles, as distasteful as he thought them to be, were the wave of the future.  So he left his still-successful carriage company, one of the world’s largest, to join the new Buick company.

Ultimately, Durant went on to found General Motors.

The point?  Durant’s times were a lot like ours.  He was living at the edge of a paradigm shift-a whole new mode of transportation.  Cars did not take over from carriages immediately, but within a decade, it was obvious that they would soon rule the road. 

We live in a similar age, but the paradigm that’s shifting is communication, not transportation.  One advantage that Durant had over today’s current industry-in-crisis — newspapers — is that the industrial landscape of his day was shifting more slowly.  Metro newspapers have gone from boom to bust in a decade (though many in the know have been pointing to the danger signs for metros even before the advent of the Internet).

The just-released Pew Report only confirms the bad news for big-city newspapers. According to the report, newspaper ad revenues (including online) declined by 26 percent last year, bringing the total loss for the past three years to 43 percent.   The Gawker blog even headlined the recent post on the Pew Report this way:  “There is Literally No Way to Make Money Selling News.”  Wrote Gawker:  “That is the only conclusion a reasonable person can reach reading this new Pew Foundation report. Paywalls are anathema. Nobody clicks on ads. The value of news is zero dollars and zero cents.”

To be fair, the Pew Report did talk about some encouraging news, mainly that metros, after having shed considerable expenses and salaries, are returning to profitability.  But even that has a downside:  These papers are now mere shadows of their former selves.  The Report quotes a journalist who said that the independent contractors who deliver the paper complain that the Monday edition doesn’t have enough throw-weight to get all the way up the porch.  The report said that newspapers now spend $1.6 billion less annually on reporting and editing than they did a decade ago.

But what about community papers, generally acknowledged to be the most successful part of newspaper journalism right now?  Is our situation as bleak – or at least uncertain – as that of our metro brothers? And what are the modern-day journalistic Will Durants doing as they face that future?

First of all, what’s the good news in community journalism, as compared to the metros in crisis?  Community journalism is different in the following ways:

• Competition.  If you want the news in communities across Texas, typically newspapers are your best bet.  We don’t have all of the magazines, radio and TV competitors that big-city papers have.  And Internet penetration is not as significant – some rural communities do now have broadband services available and mobile service is sometimes spotty.  We have a near-monopoly on the news that matters.  You can’t say it better than one small-newspaper editor in Pennsylvania did:  “It’s often said that newspapers are dying, but that’s a gross oversimplification. The papers with the big problems are the metropolitan dailies. But here, if you want to read a professionally written news story about what the Board of Township Supervisors did on Thursday, you really don’t have much choice but to pick up the Elizabethtown Advocate, because I was the only journalist at that meeting. I am the only game in town.”
• Demographics.  The population is often older, which means they are more print-loyal.  Older readers are comfortable with their coffee and morning paper and less likely to want to go online for their news — even if there were an online source for local news, which there typically isn’t.
• Advertising effectiveness. The bottom line is that if you want the news in many communities in Texas, we’re pretty much the only game in town.  And local businesses who want to reach consumers know that — there’s no medium more effective than the newspaper.  All newspapers have been affected by the economic downturn as the advertisers they depend on suffered in the recession.  But community newspapers have taken less of a hit.  In the second quarter of 2009, metro ad sales dropped off a little more than 30 percent; ad sales in community papers dropped off just over 12 percent.

But the Pew Report contains some disquieting news for community newspapers:

• As we drop pages in cost-cutting and because of less advertising, our product becomes less attractive to readers.  A less attractive paper will draw fewer readers, and fewer readers mean advertisers see less value in newspapers….the classic chick-and-the-egg dilemma. One small-city newspaper owner quoted in the report said he is “worried as hell we’re not going to have enough news in the newspaper to make it worth picking up for 50 cents, let alone 75 cents.”
• One hopeful sign for journalism cited in the report may not be hopeful at all for community papers in Texas.  The report noted that it is easier than ever now to start new newspapers on the Web, without the overhead costs that ink-on-paper media have.  In other words, it has never been easier for someone with a computer and just a little Web savvy to become your competitor.
• We are faced with a significant dilemma:  Our readers are older and are not being replaced by younger readers.  The future is clearly on the Web, but most of our revenues are from the traditional print product. 

The first automobiles hit road experimentally in the 1890s.  The horse still ruled transportation.  In the early 1900s, when cars began to be manufactured on a larger scale, most people still rode horses.  Lots of folk thought they were a fad.  Carriage makers were still profitable.

But Durant and others realized that the future was in the automobile — that cars would not instantly dominate the road, but they would inevitably dominate the road.

Unfortunately, we in Texas community journalism are faced with the challenge of playing on two courts at one time.  Our revenue and most of our audience are in print, and we cannot afford to neglect our newspapers.  But our future is inevitably digital, and while we focus on putting out the best print product we can, we must explore what our digital future will be like.

At the Center, we’re dedicated to helping all we can.  We have done workshops on building your Web presence, and we will do more.  We are already flight-testing our free content management system with several Texas community papers; we hope to make it widely available — free — as soon as possible.  And we offer consulting services to those papers who are taking the first steps toward an improved Web product.

Will Durant was making money manufacturing carriages.  But he realized that the future was elsewhere.  And if he had stayed with carriages, he may have ended up losing everything.

The Center wants to help those of you who are looking to find your place in a future of digital community journalism.  And in the meantime, we hope to help you produce the best possible printed newspaper.

Some of you will remember Vicki Simons, who – along with her husband Tony Jones – led two seminars on newspaper management for us five years ago. Vicki has been heroically battling cancer, and, of course, blogging about it (vickicancer.blogspot.com). She died of that cancer on March 1. And in typical Vicki fashion, she left her own obit, which you can read at the URL above. I know you join us at the Center in mourning a great leader in community journalism.