College newspaper buys tiny papers to stem news deserts
With hundreds of U.S. newspaper closings leaving legions with little access to local news, a college newspaper in Iowa has stepped up to buy two struggling weekly publications.
The move by The Daily Iowan, a nonprofit student paper for the University of Iowa, is believed to be a first, though other universities are stepping up to fill America’s news void in different ways.
Students will work alongside the papers’ existing one- or two-person reporting staffs and put themselves to work covering the small communities of Mount Vernon, Lisbon and Solon, Iowa. The weeklies’ owner proposed the buyout to save the publications, which have a combined circulation of 1,900.
“It’s a really great way to help the problem of news deserts in rural areas,” said Sabine Martin, executive editor of The Daily Iowan, who will copy edit stories for one of the papers. She already oversees editorial operations for a school paper whose most recent tax filings show had more than $2 million in net assets.
Since 2005, the U.S. has lost about 70% of newsroom jobs and one-third of all newspapers, said Zach Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project at Northwestern University. He described the industry’s downfall as a “cliff dive.”
Traditional media has been in that dive since big tech and social media began siphoning off the monster share of advertising dollars.
Richard Watts, director for the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont, said his group has identified 120 university-led student reporting programs that provide local news.
A handful of college publications had already been heavily invested in local news, including the University of Missouri, where professional editors supervise journalism students who have produced a community newspaper for decades.
“There’s lots of examples of programs stepping in because the local media ecosystem doesn’t exist in the way it once did,” said Watts, whose school oversees a service that provides student stories to professional news outlets.
It’s a microcosm of industry experimentation, said Barbara Allen, director of college programming at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.
“I don’t think anybody out there is bold enough yet to say, you know, this is the magic bullet,” she said. “We now believe in a magic shotgun ... it’s going to take hundreds of pellets.”
Each college newspaper attack on news deserts — wide swaths of U.S. communities with no dedicated source of local news — looks different. Some report on state legislatures and distribute the stories statewide. Others produce stories for Spanish-language publications or expand their coverage beyond campus events so they can circulate their papers throughout the community, Watts said.
The man behind selling the two Iowa papers is Bob Woodward, no relation to the Watergate scandal reporter. His family’s business, Woodward Communications, was trying to figure out what to do with two properties that “weren’t performing very well.”
Woodward knew that journalism students at the University of Kansas run an online news site for a nearby community that lost its newspaper. He also knew that the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication saved a 148-year-old weekly, The Oglethorpe Echo, in 2021 by taking it over and turning it into a nonprofit that students write stories for. The deal went through virtually for free, distinguishing it from The Daily Iowan transaction.
With these stories in mind, Woodward approached The Daily Iowan’s publisher, Jason Brummond, and asked if it would be interested in a deal.
The deal was finalized in February, with the nonprofit that runs The Daily Iowan taking over the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun and the Solon Economist.
Neither Woodward nor Brummond disclosed the sale price.