About half of the for-profit local online new sites in our survey made a profit last year. Despite challenges, most local online news publishers are optimistic that their sites will be sustainable.
In our April-May survey of 66 publishers whose sites are on our list of promising sites, we found that:
- Seven in 10 said they are greatly or somewhat optimistic about making their sites sustainable; none said they were not optimistic and only one said “somewhat unoptimistic.”
- Fifty-six percent of the sites said they operate as for-profits, and half of those said they made profit last year. About a third of the sites are non-profit.
- Most of the sites are relatively young. More than half launched less than two years ago; more than a third launched within the last two to five years.
Many sites start with a focus on content and user outreach so many of the young sites in the survey may just be getting serious about revenue.
Publishers frequently cited money as a challenge in interviews for the telephone survey.
"Advertising drives online just as it would print,” said Jim Williams of inMaricopa.com in Arizona. “I think we would worry about how the economy goes. I hope the economy is picking up and our business will as well.”
Another publisher cited “the factor of scale … We may be too small for people to take us seriously ... When you are a very small news operation, some potential sponsors think that it is a big headache for a small audience.”
Others are concerned about competition from large companies entering the micro-local market, like AOL’s Patch.com.
Chantal Foster of dukecityfix.com said she is confident the local niche site can compete for traffic with bigger organizations. But it’s a challenge.
“This is an informal, community grassroots sort of news site. It's a bit difficult to compete with them. Now that media is allowing more community participation for the larger news sources, they're competing on our 'turf.' They're coming from the top down and we're going from the bottom up,” Foster said.
Attracting new users and fostering engagement pose continuing challenges.
“Finding ways to engage the audience so it would actually mean more to them to be involved, because right now we have only volunteer staff, and finding people who want to write consistently and who are very passionate about the city and don't get discouraged,” said Andre Natta, theterminal.com in Birmingham, Ala.
Others said a key challenge is balancing time for editorial content with time to focus on revenue.
“I don't want to be so caught up with the money issue that I forget why I started the site - social justice as a new form of journalism,” said Marisa Trevino of Latina Lista.
Revenue will be a key topic at our upcoming conference for local online news publishers. We’re using the survey findings to shape an agenda for Block by Block: Community News Summit 2010 in Chicago Sept. 23-24. Jay Rosen and I are co-hosts. We’re excited about the opportunity to meet and work with people who are shaping the future of community news.
More survey results:
Part 1: Bloggers no more June 1, 2010
Read More
Part 2: Community drives mission June 8, 2010
Read More
Part 3: Revenue streams June 15, 2010
Read More
About the survey
Reynolds Journalism Institute conducted telephone interviews with 66 local online news publishers whose sites met our criteria for producing original news, working to be accurate, fair and transparent, and developing revenue in April and May 2010. The oldest site started in 1998 but about two thirds of the sites were founded in 2008 or 2009. The sites vary widely in reach – from 1,200 to 400,000 unique visitors a month. The online publishers are predominantly white men, more than half college educated. They range in age from 22 to 68. Our goal was to learn more about their successes and their challenges in operating local news sites.
The survey was conducted under the direction of Ken Fleming, associate director of research for the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Adam Maksl, a Missouri doctoral student, assisted in developing the survey questionnaire and in analyzing the results.
Kenneth Fleming Director of the Center for Advanced Social Research (CASR) Kenneth Fleming obtained a doctoral degree in mass communication and journalism in 2005 and an MBA in finance in 1993 from University of Missouri. His research interests include the relationship between social capital and mass media, health communication, political communication, and research methodology. He has extensive experience in social science survey research including research design, survey instrument development, sampling, data collection and complex data analysis.
Adam Maksl is a doctoral student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he studies new media, censorship, and youth journalism. Previously, he was assistant director of workshops in the Department of Journalism at Ball State University, where he helped coordinate various scholastic journalism outreach programs and taught undergraduate courses as an adjunct instructor. He also briefly worked as a high school journalism teacher. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism and English education from Indiana University and a master's degree in journalism from Ball State University.
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