Hometown newspaper for Ashland, Oregon

This headline has a hot link:  Ashland.news

Click on it and find the first edition of a new "newspaper."

Newspaper is in quotes because it isn't a newspaper. It isn't printed on paper. It is a website, attempting to do the things that local newspapers formerly did, but now do not.

Ashland.news re-creates a local newspaper for Ashland, published via a website. It will present the sort of news that communities create when normal living takes place there. It will publish news about schools, city government, special events, and the goings-on at Southern Oregon University, Shakespeare, and other institutions important to Ashland. Most of what happens in Ashland isn't "newsworthy" to people outside the area: Snow days at Ashland High School, a street closure, a construction project at Lithia Park. Ashland faced the fate of communities all across America. The business model for their local news disappeared. 

The Medford-Ashland area has it better than most places our size. Medford is a TV broadcast center for a region with over 400,000 people. We have four local stations that broadcast news. TV reporters want stories to fill their "news hole" and Ashland gets some of that attention. TV news has a strong bias toward stories that are visually interesting. Fires are visual. Protests with vivid signs are visual. It is the nature of TV.

Ashland.news story today

Ashland.news will publish those stories and more: Newspaper-type stories. Much of what is important for people to know about their community is only accessable to an audience willing to read. That is why newspapers thrived. For most of the 20th century small-town newspapers were monopolies that supported news-gathering  through ad revenue. Print newspapers still get public notice revenue and they get paid to run obituaries but their classified advertising drifted to Craigslist, eBay, realtor.com, and other on-line sites. Display ads nearly disappeared--except for advertisements for the newspaper itself. Newspapers get paid to deliver inserts. Inserts still work. The revenue does not support robust news-gathering, so we got less and less of it.  Ashland residents noticed.

Ashland.news expects to thrive with a different business model from traditional newspapers: Donations. It is the model of public radio and television. People who value the service are asked to pay for it voluntarily. Because it is on-line instead of a physical newspaper, people who donate are paying for news not paper and delivery. 

Ashland.news got started with some founder/angel donors, but it will survive long term by building a subscriber/donor base. People pay for "TV worth watching." People who value public radio donate to it. We are accustomed to subscription services. If people value newspaper-type news, they will pay for it voluntarily. That is the plan.

Will Ashland.news succeed? We don't know yet. If a couple thousand Ashland households value local news, then it will. The old model is broken. This may be the future of local news.

[Disclosure:  I am one of the founding donors to Ashland.news. I have no financial interest in it. The nonprofit paper has a board of directors; I am not on it. I wish Ashland.news well. In the future I might decide to run display ads in the paper to see if people who read Ashland.news find this blog of interest. In that case I will pay the same rate as anyone else.]