As readers the world over probably already know, times are tough for newspapers everywhere and, increasingly, community newspapers—including this one—are feeling the pinch.
It’s no fun to contemplate, but we want our readers to fully understand what’s going on here.
Last year was a punch in the gut for The Herald.
We miraculously survived as the pandemic decimated our revenues and inflation brought all of our costs ever higher, however, 2023 was the business’s worst year on record.
We closed the year with a dismal December and a roughly $80,000 deficit. January and February are perennially hard months, but this February saw a $14,000 loss.
This is all to say that The Herald is in a more precarious position than it has ever been and if things don’t improve the newspaper will cease to exist.
We believe that a community newspaper is an important social institution that’s worth perpetuating, so we’re taking several steps, some of which will impact what readers see.
For example, we’ll be closing the office on Fridays and making an effort to scale back on hours as we try to contain costs.
The number of pages in the paper will also shrink to match the advertising that we can secure. That will mean tough decisions about what can stay in the paper. Things such as the full page of puzzles will likely have to go.
Many of the things we attempt will be less visible.
We’ll be looking hard to see if changes to the business structure could better serve the community. We’ll be looking for ways to use what cash we have left smartly. We’ll be looking for other revenue sources. And we’ll be working hard to re-engage advertisers that have drifted away.
It’s going to be hard, but we’re going to do our best to get through it.
Understanding Newspaper Revenue
A newspaper is unique among businesses in that its primary product—news— isn’t one that yields much revenue. Subscriptions and single-issue sales bring in some cash, but traditionally, advertising—selling space alongside but separate from the news—has been where the money is made.
The financial health of a newspaper can be seen in the balance of advertising compared to news items. The traditional watermark is about 50% of each. Last week’s issue clocked in at 32.535% advertising, if you count our own in-house ads.
Online, the landscape is worse. Not only do web ads have the potential to be a privacy nightmare for readers, tracking their movements around the internet, their value is also negligible. Advertisers have become accustomed to paying pennies to massive companies with millions of users. Small organizations can’t make that kind of high-volume math add up.
If ads are harder to find, the obvious place to look is the readers.
If you count all of the papers and all of our active online memberships, we circulate around 4,000 copies of The Herald each week— times 52 issues, that’s 208,000 each year that hits someone’s eyeballs. To reach the annual revenue needed to operate The Herald at a skeleton level we would need to triple our subscription price (and not lose any readers because of it).
Many people already feel stretched shelling out $46 per year for a Herald subscription and such a big jump would price too many out of the news.
We’re all a part of this community and the point of the news is that it’s for everyone.
It’s likely prices will have to increase at some point not far in the future, but what we’d like to try first is to offer a way for those who can afford it to help out.
Starting this week, readers will find a section of The Herald website where they may help with a financial gift. We are not a non-profit company, so gifts aren’t tax-deductible, but they would help tremendously to keep the presses rolling while we figure out our next steps to keep The Herald alive.