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Monday, August 20, 2018

West Virginia newspapers look for new owners to keep them going; WVU College of Media trying to help

Many aging editors of small rural newspapers, in West Virginia at least, are holding off retirement because they have no successor and don't want the paper to fold. In the Mountain State, which has 19 dailies and 54 weeklies, West Virginia Press Association Executive Director Don Smith said he'd received many phone calls from long-time owners looking for someone to take over, Mark Jurkowitz writes for Nieman Lab.

Smith and others didn't want to see these papers go out of business for lack of an editor. "So with some help from the state and a partnership with Reed College of Media at West Virginia University, the WVPA is launching an effort to replenish the shrinking pool of independent community publishers at a time when newspapers aren’t exactly flourishing family businesses to be passed through generations," Jurkowitz reports. "The plan has two basic components. One is to prepare veteran newspaper operators to effectively market and sell their properties. The flip side is to create a pipeline of younger, committed buyers who would become the next wave of community publishers. Most notably, that effort involves the creation of a college curriculum at WVU that might be the first 'publisher’s track' program offered in an academic setting."

WVU is also creating a master's degree program in Media Innovation and Solutions with a year-long fellowship in an effort to lure and train prospective editors. Smith said the problem isn't limited to West Virginia, but as far as he knows no one else has tried such an approach to help solve it, Jurkowitz reports.

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