As rural newspapers confront adaptation to digital, is there a rural model that works? Indianola, Iowa, may help tell us

By Al Cross, director, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

The future-of-newspapers piece that seems to have had the most circulation in the past week was “There is a model out there that works,” by William Turvill in the Press Gazette, the industry's leading trade publication in the United Kingdom. The headline is a quote from Jay Senter, co-owner of the Shawnee Mission Post, a money-making local-news site for Johnson County, Kansas, pop. 610,000, in the Kansas City suburbs. “There is a consensus model emerging of a way that you can do this,” Senter says, and the Post seems to be proof of it.

It’s an inspiring and instructive success story, but it doesn’t apply to most rural communities. Asked how he and partner Julia Westhoff were able to get 6,000 subscribers, Senter noted the area’s affluence (the median household income is about $92,000). In other words, it has lots of disposable income, making a $77 subscription a relatively easy choice for readers who want reliable local news. “Senter is not sure his model could succeed in a poorer area,” Turvill reports. And the story’s closing quote is telling: “The scary thing is that even in a market as ideal as Johnson County is for a product like this, we barely made it. We had our backs against the wall.”

A better test is being undertaken in a place with a median household income of about $77,000 and a 2020 census population of 52,403. That’s Warren County, Iowa, part of the Des Moines metropolitan statistical area, likely because of commuting patterns; it's still primarily rural.

That's where Amy Duncan and Mark Davitt, former executives of The Indianola Record-Herald and the Indianola Tribune, have bought it from Gannett and are publishing a weekly print edition. We reported this on The Rural Blog, but Jim Iovino of West Virginia University has a more detailed report in his latest email update for the NewStart Alliance: “Gannett had been charging about $23 per year for a print subscription. Duncan said the new rate is $60 for print or digital, and if you want to add print to a digital subscription it’s an additional $20.” Duncan told him, “We jumped it to 60 and have not heard a single word of complaint so far. People know us, and know this is going to be worth 60 bucks. There is a responsibility right there to put out something worth the money.”

“People know us.” That’s one key. Duncan and Davitt have worked a combined 50 years at the newspaper. Also, “something worth the money.” In other words, don’t expect people to pay good money for poor journalism. Sustainability will require quality.

UPDATE, July 11: In an interview with NPR broadcast Sunday, Duncan gave one of the better descriptions of community journalism that I have seen, and how their fate depends on the community: "A town is where people live and they kind of share a ZIP code. But a community is a place where you talk about the same things, you think about some of the same things and, in a lot of ways, you want the same things. You want a place that you can live and that you're safe and that your kids are safe and you get services. So, you know, we want people to know what's happening in their town and be able to make decisions about what they like and what they don't like. . . . We might not be able to make it work, but we have to try. I mean, we have to let the residents of the county and the potential readers decide whether it survives."