A revived VillageSoup operation continues to grow
In 2012, the abrupt demise of Village NetMedia, the parent company of multiple weekly newspapers in central and coastal Maine, delivered a blow to the news industry. Five years earlier, the company had received an $885,000 Knight News Challenge grant to develop an open-source version of its VillageSoup online news system, which tapped partnerships and relationships within the community to post news and events. The “hyperlocal” news experiment was tested as a new source of revenue and bolstered hopes that its hybrid print-online news model could work.
But it didn't. On March 9, 2012, the company folded and 56 people lost their jobs. Two weeks later, publisher Reade Brower bought VillageSoup's assets and revived the Camden Herald, the Courier Gazette in Rockland and the Republican Journal in Belfast.
Mainebiz checked in with Brower, who is also president of the Rockland-based Free Press, to see how efforts to revamp the publications are moving ahead.
Mainebiz: Now one year in, what signs of progress have you seen at the VillageSoup papers?
Brower: We have made excellent progress in our primary mission: to create a sustainable business so that the lights never get shut off again. We believe we have done this without sacrificing quality or quantity of news, and the evidence from 2012 agrees with us. [Print] circulation has increased 20% [to nearly 12,000].
Progress is also occurring on the advertising front as we continue to gain momentum with advertising lineage and getting clients back into the printed product who had left or scaled down. We have added reporters over the last few months and, while winter is still winter, we see the economy continuing to build a little steam and we hope to continue to grow and expand our reach in 2013.
M: How is the online paywall working and how have readers responded?
B: I think most of our readers understood, from the moment VillageSoup went dark in early March of 2012, that asking them for 8 cents a day [for access to news on the website] was reasonable. That works out to about the cost of one coffee and muffin a month! Our page views and unique users have risen steadily throughout the first nine months and we expect that to continue growing, although at a slower pace.
What is important is for our readers to understand that you can't deliver the news free, not if you want 10 reporters and you want to remain viable financially. Somebody has to pay for that, and the advertisers can only kick in so much. While people have long understood paying $1 for a weekly newspaper, the 56 cents a week we ask for Internet-only [news] is a new concept, so it has taken some time for readers to understand. Though the cost of newsprint goes away, the content still comes at a cost for reporters and, as a fiscally responsible business, we must get paid for it.
M: The VillageSoup business model couples development of the content management system — its own revenue stream — with an online and print news operation. How has the platform development side of the business changed and what's ahead for 2013?
B: For 2013, we will continue to develop and improve the platform and we are now ready to market and promote this to more newspapers. We added one new client in the first quarter of 2013 and our business plan is pretty simple: as we add on platform users, we'll increase the budget for programming and development. On the local VillageSoup, we just added well-known meteorologist Ken McKinley who is doing a morning weather video for Knox County. If successful in our market, we will roll that out to our platform partners.
With continued small incremental growth, I believe VillageSoup will continue to be an industry leader because it has many unique components to it that no other platform offers. Specifically, the 'biz membership' platform [businesses pay to post content] is the most sophisticated on the market and gives newspapers a way to create significant revenues from their Internet product. In the past, most revenue from the Internet came from [banner and button ads], now biz memberships are leading the way to high revenues and a sustainable model.
M: What are the biggest challenges facing the VillageSoup publications in the next five years?
B: We have turned the page on the perception that print is dead, but there are still many out there who want you to believe that print will disappear. Just like radio and television have morphed as time marched on, so will print. In smaller communities, like the ones we serve, the printed product still has a place. The key is to not ignore the Internet, but to embrace it, and use it in tandem with the printed products.
The Internet is the future and it is part of the equation but all the studies point to print as the driving force to get people to the Internet. We tell our clients that the Internet is a great marketplace and a great place to use to research some of your purchasing but you still need to get 'readers' to the sites. Driving people to the Internet, or directly into traditional bricks-and-mortar [stores], is still best-served, or at the least well-served, by traditional print products.
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