Rural editors and publishers among E & P's '25 over 50'; here's what they think about the future of the news media

Cathie Shaffer along Kentucky's
Country Music Highway (E&P)

Several rural editors and publishers are in Editor and Publisher's 2022 class of "25 over 50" late-career news-media professionals "nominated for their strong work ethic, transformational mindsets, commitment to journalistic and publishing excellence, and their ability to lead during challenging times." Here are the ruralites, with their responses to E&P's question, "What are your predictions for where news publishing/news media is heading?"

Cathie Shaffer, owner of The Greenup Gazette, which she started two years ago at age 71 when Community Newspaper Holdings shut down its paper in Greenup, Ky., near Ashland: "While the model of the past isn’t working as it once did, newspapers will continue. Smaller papers will continue to fill the local news void for many communities, but larger, regional papers will need to revamp how they do business and accept lower profits to succeed. I anticipate that many communities will find ways to help support locally owned newspapers in innovative ways."

Kelly J. Boldan, editor, West Central Tribune, Willmar, Minn.: "Journalism will continue delivering news and content digitally and in the coming decade, likely via technology unknown to us now. The content form will be audio, news stories, photos, podcast, videos and more. Change is constant, and changes in journalism will continue. You must learn to embrace change or be left behind. . . . The future is to report compelling content digitally now and promote it via social media."

Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, a online news site serving a community of 16,000 between Buffalo and Rochester. It's in its 14th year, which is "about 13.5 years longer than all my detractors said it would last," he told E&P. "Facebook is death by a thousand cuts. It’s slowly chipping away at the local audience and local advertising, and there is no effective answer that I can see. I sense that a large portion of the news industry is oblivious to the threat. There's a lot of chatter about the threat of Google. Google isn’t a threat. It’s a complement to what we do online. Facebook is a serious existential threat, which makes it a threat to democracy. If not for Facebook, I’d think the sky is the limit on digital growth for local news."

Chip Rowe, editor of The Highlands Current, a 10-year-old nonprofit in Cold Spring/Beacon, N.Y.: "It’s hard to believe newsprint will survive another generation, but that’s just a change of medium. The bigger issue is trust. When pollsters ask people how much they trust 'newspapers' or 'the media,' we manage to beat Congress. The question is unfair, of course — what is 'the media?' — but you hope that outlets that adopt some kind of transparency and report from the gray zone will survive and thrive. An important part of that is a populace that will accept the gray over the black and white, which I don’t think is the trend."

Tim Timmons, CEO of Sagamore News Media, Crawfordsville and Noblesville, Ind.: "There’s no doubt of the danger, yet there is opportunity as well. I think the biggest danger lies in trying to continue operating as traditional newspapers. . . . As an industry, we would give a lot if readers would spend as much time with our product as they do scrolling through Facebook. Yet, in so many cases, we continue to produce the same kind of front pages and news that we did five, 10 or 30 years ago. . . . We have an opportunity to reinvent ourselves into media companies that connect to our communities in ways we’ve never done before. And if we do, our future looks pretty good."

Ron Vodenichar, president and publisher, the Butler Eagle, Butler, Pa.: "I have managed to keep a small family-owned newspaper successful and viable through the many challenges over the past 34 years. . . . My hope for the future is that local news remains a strong factor in communities and that we never let go of the concept that no one, not an editor, not a reporter, not an ad director or a publisher knows what the reader wants. We must always strive to give them that."