Now WJCT News 89.9 is a mid-market public radio station that had a small news staff (7 including our daily public affairs talk show) and is the kind of station Prof. Patterson’s study (which we participated in, BTW) identified as the majorty: not the leading news outlet in our market, and with a total local news budget under $1m.
I do not disagree that most public radio station have been “slow in their digital transormation.” But in Jacksonville we have been focused on making up for lost time, and created a separate operation and brand (Jacksonville Today) which is not just “digital first” but “digital only.” We freed our Jax Today team from our legacy tech stack (including the CMS provided by NPR that nearly all public radio stations use, but which is limiting) and legacy broadcast-oriented culture and have focused our attention outwards, to the world of digital first journalism outlets including both for-profit and non-profit, rather than into what can be the insular world of public media.
The results at Jacksonville Today are encouraging. More than $2m in “seed funding” raised, most of it locally - in a medium sized southern market not nearly as hospitable to public radio as our northern peer cities. A circulation for our hand-crafted daily news email (15K+) which now rivals the total circulation of our daily newspaper of record, the Florida Times-Union, and continues to grow nicely. A “reader revenue” campaign last November / December which saw more than 500 contributors - more than half of them had no giving history with the public radio station. Sponsorship, which is priced competitively, is now sold-out. These are all modest numbers in larger markets, but they are meaningful here. And the journalism has been important: large numbers of people using - and telling us they appreciate - Jax today voters guides (we have mayor and city council elections happening), and many other examples of coverage with impact.
It’s not that we’ve got this all figured out, far from it. We will still be dependent on philanthropic support - especially if we want to increase our reporting capabilities - for some time. We have a long way to go.
But we have been able to move down this Jacksonville Today road more quickly because we had a base of news operations and infrastructure underneath the new CMS, CRM, digital marketing tools and new reporting and editing capabilities that we've built alongside. In looking at the potential of the public radio world to become a more meaningful part of the solution to the local news crisis, the example of WJCT and Jacksonville Today should not be ignored.
In 2004, I was a struggling freelance public radio reporter, scraping together a living selling different versions of the same story to as many places as I could. My biggest client was a very ambitious local NPR affiliate with a signal where I live but no office. At the time, they did not archive anything online and refused to do so out of a fear it would cannibalize listenership. So I started a podcast website in 2005 to experiment.
In 2023, I look back at a digital career that includes working for a nonprofit start-up as well as creating a product I believe competes with public radio as well as the daily newspaper. But I don't want to compete. I want to collaborate. I deliberately produce a weekly list of what's coming up in local government so other reporters can pick up assignments. That's especially true of television. Here's a direct quote from a news director who also is one of my paid subscribers on Substack:
"We really appreciate your coverage – it helps inform our decision making – and together bolsters the kind of community coverage that can really matter."
That is why I do what I do. Thank you for this post. One day I'll figure out how to turn what I do into a business. Corporate management will never have direct access to my talents ever again.
Besides public radio and public television, would you like to know who else is not going to solve the problems of ghost newspapers and news deserts? College journalism programs and their students. Despite the buzz about the new Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, most efforts in its "case studies and fact sheets" are state capital news bureaus that go back decades and other programs that aren't year-round, permanent efforts of journalism students to cover an area with a ghost newspaper or news desert. There's a mismatch of numbers: about three times as many daily newspapers and about 10 times as many non-daily general interest newspapers as there are college journalism programs. There's also a mismatch of geography. The common wisdom is that journalism students will not regularly drive more than 15 miles to cover local news, while ghost newspapers and especially news deserts are almost all much farther than 15 miles from a college journalism program. Exceptions, such as Albany (GA) State University's journalism program being almost complete surrounded by news desert counties (which ASU is doing nothing about so far), are rare. Texas, in particular, is a big problem geographically. I detailed all of this and more in my paper, "Understanding news deserts: Look at local economies, geography, and sociology of journalism," presented at the August 2022 convention of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication. (And unlike most of the rush of academics, consultants, nonprofit founders and funders who suddenly have declared themselves fans of, and experts on, community journalism, I've been at this a while. Just a few examples, I wrote about the geographical mismatch of journalism schools and ghost newspapers in 2010; I presented a paper on all ownership succession possibilities for small newspapers in 1998; and I was editor/publisher of a suburban weekly in 1986.)
Indeed, Dick. We'll see what KERA adds to the Denton Record-Chronicle once that takeover becomes complete. (That said, it has more thn 6-10 staffers, and even that number would be more than the DRC has on the editorial side.)
Now WJCT News 89.9 is a mid-market public radio station that had a small news staff (7 including our daily public affairs talk show) and is the kind of station Prof. Patterson’s study (which we participated in, BTW) identified as the majorty: not the leading news outlet in our market, and with a total local news budget under $1m.
I do not disagree that most public radio station have been “slow in their digital transormation.” But in Jacksonville we have been focused on making up for lost time, and created a separate operation and brand (Jacksonville Today) which is not just “digital first” but “digital only.” We freed our Jax Today team from our legacy tech stack (including the CMS provided by NPR that nearly all public radio stations use, but which is limiting) and legacy broadcast-oriented culture and have focused our attention outwards, to the world of digital first journalism outlets including both for-profit and non-profit, rather than into what can be the insular world of public media.
The results at Jacksonville Today are encouraging. More than $2m in “seed funding” raised, most of it locally - in a medium sized southern market not nearly as hospitable to public radio as our northern peer cities. A circulation for our hand-crafted daily news email (15K+) which now rivals the total circulation of our daily newspaper of record, the Florida Times-Union, and continues to grow nicely. A “reader revenue” campaign last November / December which saw more than 500 contributors - more than half of them had no giving history with the public radio station. Sponsorship, which is priced competitively, is now sold-out. These are all modest numbers in larger markets, but they are meaningful here. And the journalism has been important: large numbers of people using - and telling us they appreciate - Jax today voters guides (we have mayor and city council elections happening), and many other examples of coverage with impact.
It’s not that we’ve got this all figured out, far from it. We will still be dependent on philanthropic support - especially if we want to increase our reporting capabilities - for some time. We have a long way to go.
But we have been able to move down this Jacksonville Today road more quickly because we had a base of news operations and infrastructure underneath the new CMS, CRM, digital marketing tools and new reporting and editing capabilities that we've built alongside. In looking at the potential of the public radio world to become a more meaningful part of the solution to the local news crisis, the example of WJCT and Jacksonville Today should not be ignored.
In 2004, I was a struggling freelance public radio reporter, scraping together a living selling different versions of the same story to as many places as I could. My biggest client was a very ambitious local NPR affiliate with a signal where I live but no office. At the time, they did not archive anything online and refused to do so out of a fear it would cannibalize listenership. So I started a podcast website in 2005 to experiment.
In 2023, I look back at a digital career that includes working for a nonprofit start-up as well as creating a product I believe competes with public radio as well as the daily newspaper. But I don't want to compete. I want to collaborate. I deliberately produce a weekly list of what's coming up in local government so other reporters can pick up assignments. That's especially true of television. Here's a direct quote from a news director who also is one of my paid subscribers on Substack:
"We really appreciate your coverage – it helps inform our decision making – and together bolsters the kind of community coverage that can really matter."
That is why I do what I do. Thank you for this post. One day I'll figure out how to turn what I do into a business. Corporate management will never have direct access to my talents ever again.
Appreciate you sharing this.
Thanks so much for this, Sean
Besides public radio and public television, would you like to know who else is not going to solve the problems of ghost newspapers and news deserts? College journalism programs and their students. Despite the buzz about the new Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, most efforts in its "case studies and fact sheets" are state capital news bureaus that go back decades and other programs that aren't year-round, permanent efforts of journalism students to cover an area with a ghost newspaper or news desert. There's a mismatch of numbers: about three times as many daily newspapers and about 10 times as many non-daily general interest newspapers as there are college journalism programs. There's also a mismatch of geography. The common wisdom is that journalism students will not regularly drive more than 15 miles to cover local news, while ghost newspapers and especially news deserts are almost all much farther than 15 miles from a college journalism program. Exceptions, such as Albany (GA) State University's journalism program being almost complete surrounded by news desert counties (which ASU is doing nothing about so far), are rare. Texas, in particular, is a big problem geographically. I detailed all of this and more in my paper, "Understanding news deserts: Look at local economies, geography, and sociology of journalism," presented at the August 2022 convention of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication. (And unlike most of the rush of academics, consultants, nonprofit founders and funders who suddenly have declared themselves fans of, and experts on, community journalism, I've been at this a while. Just a few examples, I wrote about the geographical mismatch of journalism schools and ghost newspapers in 2010; I presented a paper on all ownership succession possibilities for small newspapers in 1998; and I was editor/publisher of a suburban weekly in 1986.)
Indeed, Dick. We'll see what KERA adds to the Denton Record-Chronicle once that takeover becomes complete. (That said, it has more thn 6-10 staffers, and even that number would be more than the DRC has on the editorial side.)