For 29 and a half years, the Leader has brought readers uncountable stories of Scout meetings, military promotions, government shenanigans (sometimes followed by indignant, fiery editorials), high school sports, weddings, births, obits and everything else under the sun – the stories of your lives.
Since we started publishing in 1994, we’ve used a newspaper business model that had worked well for a century or more: Advertisers in the Leader would foot the bill. Readers would get the paper for free and hopefully pay back the advertisers to some degree by shopping with them for goods or services.
Sadly, that model has been undermined almost from the day we started by another creation that debuted about the same time – the internet, which seemed determined from Day One to provide news for free by “borrowing” it from news organizations like ours that actually paid people to gather it.
Later, another powerful force stepped onto the stage – social media. Newspapers found the journalistic work they paid to produce syphoned off without compensation, and their advertising revenue, too.
That’s an enormous problem for newspapers small and large.
When advertising revenue drops, it’s harder to pay reporters, the printer or the post office to bring your Leader to you or deliver news online.
The demand for local news is still strong, but the business model we started with is like a 29-and-a-half-year-old vehicle – we’re leaking a little oil, friends.
This is why we seek your participation in our Support Local Journalism initiative.
Here is the straightest of straight talk: We are asking readers to pay part of the freight if they still want to have a hometown paper.
It costs about $45 per year for each newspaper we print and mail for 52 weeks. That’s our baseline. If you could spare that much on an annual basis, it would go a long way toward keeping the Leader coming to your home. We won’t discourage those who feel more generous.
We’ve always considered our readers to be partners in our pirate ship operation. I’ve called it that since five of us jumped ship from the old Suburban Journals in 1994 to start our own paper.
You’ve been with us ever since, and you’ve helped us along the way, as we have continued to provide a print newspaper, developed a website and entered the digital world.
In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, thousands of you signed requester cards that simply said, “Send Me the Leader.”
That qualified our newspaper for a different postal permit that actually sped up delivery while saving a ton of postage.
It’s been a long time since anyone got into the newspaper business to make a lot of money. William Randolph Hearst managed it, as did Joseph Pulitzer and a few others. These days, with costs rising as revenues fall, breaking even seems like a lofty goal.
This time, the Leader needs its readers to become financial partners. Most people understand they must pay for products they wish to purchase or consume. It should not come as a shock to realize that local news also costs something to produce and deliver.
The old business model shielded readers from having to participate like that, even as they engaged by reading our paper, sending letters to the editor, calling with story ideas, complaints or compliments, and even filling out requester cards to help with the postage bill.
That old model’s legs are now wobbly. It is unfair and no longer workable to ask advertisers to bear the entire cost.
We have worked on your behalf for nearly three decades. Now we’re asking you to provide solid legs to take us into the future. Visit myleaderpaper.com/donate to learn how you can.
Alongside this column, we offer some answers to questions you might want answered, and we have one for you, too: Will you step up for your hometown paper?
Thank you.
