Walter E. Hussman, Jr., chairman of WEHCO Media, Inc. and publisher of the El Dorado News-Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and other newspapers in Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee, spoke Monday at the regular meeting of the El Dorado Rotary Club.
“The Rotary Club hasn’t met in person since March, when cases of COVID-19 began spreading throughout Arkansas. Earlier this month, Dr. Brian Jones said the group will consider moving back to in-person meetings in July, depending on guidance from the state on post-COVID reopening.
Hussman, who got his start as a newspaperman at the News-Times after he graduated high school, spoke about economic troubles the newspaper industry is facing and the ways he, as publisher of the state’s only statewide newspaper as well as many smaller outlets focused on community journalism, plans to combat those.
“Over 2,000 newspapers have closed since 2004; now, most of those were weeklies, but 75 were dailies. We’ve lost some of our newspapers here in Arkansas — we’ve lost newspapers in Hope, in Arkadelphia, in Stuttgart,” he said.
Historically, Hussman said, newspapers have gotten 80% of their revenue from advertising; however, with the rise of digital advertising through platforms like Facebook and Google, those revenues have declined steeply since their peak in 2004.
“Most of the ad revenues in America have gone to Facebook and Google. Newspapers in 2017 in the U.S., and this is everything from the New York Times to the El Dorado News-Times, were taking in about $2.6 billion in digital ads; Facebook and Google take $70 billion in digital ads,” he said.
Along with the sharp decline in ad revenues, the cost of printing has become too much for many smaller publications to bear. The News-Times closed its printing press in April, 2018; the print edition is now printed in Little Rock, sharing a press with the Democrat-Gazette.
Hussman noted that several newspaper publishing companies have filed for bankruptcy in the past decade, including The McClatchy Company, which is one of the largest newspaper companies in the country, with 29 newspapers across 14 states.
“The print model is just not working anymore,” he said. “The big problem is that digital just has inherent economic advantages over print. It’s so much easier to replicate text and distribute it to a large audience with digital over print, and the same is true for photos, graphics, illustrations, whatever it may be. Newspaper printing presses have been closing all over the country.”
He noted that the News-Times has continued to operate with a negative cash flow for three consecutive years, with the hole growing deeper each subsequent year. He said WEHCO leadership considered converting the News-Times into a weekly publication, but having seen the investments the community has made in recent years, from the new El Dorado High School building to the Murphy Arts District, they realized the importance of continuing daily coverage of the city and Union County.
“We pretty much felt compelled to make this kind of investment if we thought it could work. It’s really an experiment; what we’ve done with the digital replica in Little Rock (at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which converted to a digital format last year) hasn’t been done anywhere else in the country,” Hussman said “But the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has a lot of subscribers statewide; what’s different about El Dorado is that it doesn’t have a large subscriber base. It’s really an experiment to determine if we can provide daily community journalism in a smaller town in America, and if it works, it could be the path forward for a lot of other smaller communities.”
The News-Times announced earlier this month that the paper will be converting to a digital format by August, with one print edition each week on Sundays in addition to the daily digital replicas. Subscribers are being offered a free iPad with which to access the daily replica, which appears as a digital version of the newspaper, but with more interactivity than is possible with a print product.
“People don’t like the idea when they first hear about it, but after they’ve done it, used the digital replica for a while, they actually like it better. We’ve done surveys with our readers, there are a number of things they like better about the replica. The most popular feature of this is the fact that they can take their two fingers, put it on an article and expand the size of the text,” he said.
The digital replica also includes photo galleries and videos that can be viewed inside the News-Times app, the ability to have articles read aloud, article sharing capabilities and others. The News-Times app is available on the Apple and Google Play stores for any mobile device. The daily digital replica is also available on eldoradonews.com.
The News-Times is currently offering free training sessions at the El Dorado Conference Center for app users; training is taking place today, from 1 to 6 p.m., and through Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with social distancing measures in place. WEHCO staff will also set appointments with subscribers to visit them personally for app training.
“We’re really excited about this in El Dorado, because if it works in El Dorado, it could work for our other smaller newspapers, so a lot is riding on what happens between now and the summer,” Hussman said. “If it works, there’s a lot more riding on it than the survival of the El Dorado News-Times.”