Can college newspapers be a salve for the ailing local media?

Spotlight News, a news app, thinks so.

Thanks for sending in your questions for the first Media Nut Mailbag; it will run later in the week (aiming for Thursday), so if you have questions, send ‘em in. 

As many colleges have been heading back to school over the last few weeks, we’re learning a couple of things. For starters, it may have been too soon to send teenagers back to school, as dorm rooms are Petri dishes in normal times. During a pandemic, it could be fatal. 

And the other thing: student newspapers are filling in the huge gaps left behind by a hollowed out local and regional press. 

(Image via Eric Ding + The Daily Tar Heel)

And the mainstream press has noticed. The Washington Post put a roundup of school newspapers that are trying to hold administrators accountable for opening up schools without clear policies. In other times, these types of editorials would come from local papers. 

Even the New York Times wants in, as it’s soliciting student journalists to write in to tell them how it’s going. 

In June, UNC published The Expanding News Desert, its fourth report “documenting and analyzing the loss of local news.”

The economic fallout from the coronavirus has turbo-charged the decline – with at least 30 newspapers closed or merged in April and May 2020, dozens of newspapers switching to online-only delivery of news, and thousands of journalists at legacy and digital news operations being furloughed or laid off. All of this raises anew fears of an “extinction-level event” that destroys many of the survivors and newcomers, and leads to the collapse of the country’s local news ecosystem.

Here’s a nifty tool to see if you live in or near a news desert. 

Poynter pointed out in June just how much of state of peril journalism is:

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Columbia Journalism Review, both at Columbia Journalism School, identified “a moment of reckoning” and announced the launch of the Journalism Crisis Project.

The Harvard Business Review veered into the world of news to publish an essay entitled Journalism’s Market Failure Is a Crisis for Democracy.

And among the hundreds of announcements of closings, mergers and cutbacks at newspapers, was this eye-popping news:

A chain that published 14 weeklies in affluent Chicago suburbs, 22nd Century Media, threw in the towel. How affluent? The U.S. median household income is $63,179; the median across the communities the chain served is almost double that — and Winnetka’s, the highest, is $216,875. “Advertising and revenue collection just stopped,” the chain’s publisher told The Chicago Tribune.

If it’s not possible to publish weekly newspapers in communities like this, where could it be?

An answer, perhaps, can be found in student newspapers. 

Sometimes it takes a biochemist-turned-data scientist and a few developers to approach the media business with a different perspective, and perhaps provide local information in a fresh way. 

Tamer Morsy found himself distracted while working at Stanford Health Care after the 2016 election. He was upset with the way misinformation on Facebook and Twitter spread, and didn’t like seeing how his hometown media properties in Scranton, Pa were drying up. 

One thing he did notice: there was an under-served audience of news-gatherers, college students. 

So he quit his job, recruited a co-founder (together, they have raised less than $275,000), bled his 401(k) and started Spotlight News, an app that brings in college newspapers from 105 universities.

“My goal is to provide sustainable news and info for college students so they’re not reliant on social (for news),” Morsy, a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient, told me, “and provide readership and revenue to college and local papers.”

Morsy started the company in 2017, spending a year in beta with Penn State and Johns Hopkins as the first two schools in the system. 

“I thought it makes sense to start with college papers,” Morsy said. “They’re doing a lot of coverage local newspapers can’t because [local papers] don’t exist in small towns.”

Spotlight News makes money through a subscription service and through ads; think of it like a Hulu model, where there’s a free version with ads, and a “full access” version. Publishers get a 70/30 split of the $9.99 monthly service. On the ads side, Morsy goes out himself and sells. Advertisers so far include Disney and Sephora, and CPMs for the app are at around $25, he said. 

“We don’t have the scale of Facebook or Flipboard, but advertisers want to get in front of college audiences,” Morsy said.

There’s also a play here for premium publishers. The company has signed deals with Tribune Publishing and Thompson Reuters, and is currently rolling out across many other properties, including the L.A. Times and finalizing with the Dallas Morning News. Morsy says the company aims to have 150 premium publishers on board by the end of the year.

If we’re going to bundle news organizations, why not bundle them for an audience thirsty for information, but also a key demographic for advertisers?

On a day which #defundNPR is trending on Twitter because bad faith actors on the Right believe that the news organization is “biased” against them, the idea of a local news aggregator can be appealing.

Dan Gainor @dangainor

There is no legitimate argument for @NPR to exist as a taxpayer-funded entity. It is ridiculously leftist and biased against the right. #DefundNPR

NPR @NPR

President Trump declined to condemn the actions of the suspected 17-year-old shooter of 3 protesters against police brutality in Kenosha — claiming, without evidence, that it appeared the gunman was acting in self-defense. https://t.co/a7LnGABckN

(Of course, an irony here is that these are the same intellectual heavyweights that decry ‘cancel culture’. Oh, also: NPR doesn’t get any direct funding from the federal government; it gets a limited amount of grants that account for 2 percent of its budget.)

But it’s a big hill to climb, as news aggregators, like Apple News and Flipboard, not to mention Twitter and Facebook, have a seemingly  insurmountable head start. Morsy isn’t fazed. 

“This is a new way to do it,” he said. “No one’s focused on college newspapers.”

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox today and every day. If you have tips or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you liked today’s edition, please consider sharing across your social networks. And if you have questions for the mailbag, email me! Have a great day. 

Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Tuesday’s Gone”

Some interesting links:

For media criticism:

• Trump’s vile tweetstorm reveals the ugly core of his ‘law and order’ campaign (WaPo)

• Journalist Quits Kenosha Paper in Protest of Its Jacob Blake Rally Coverage (NYT)

• Stanford releases very interesting AI tool that searches 270,000 hours of TV news coverage (Stanford)

For publishers:

• Google Images is making it easier to license photo rights (The Verge)

• They’re gonna go with what they know’: Publishers struggle to win new business amid pandemic (Digiday)

For the sell-side:

• GQ Dips A Toe Into Owned Commerce (A Media Operator)

For the TV business:

• WGN America’s News Nation takes on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC (L.A. Times)