"The advice that follows comes from 25 years of experience in newspaper publishing, rather than from the academy. In fairness, the reader needs to know a bit about this experience, to test its relevance against his or her own circumstances. I founded the Chronicle in 1974 in a village of 1,000 people in a county at the north end of one of America’s northern states, Vermont. The county has about 27,000 residents. By the standards of the United States it is not well off. It is bordered on the east by the last traces of the Appalachian Mountains, a worn old chain that continues down into America’s deep south, bearing pockets of rural poverty all along the way. The Chronicle is a weekly community paper with a paid circulation of about 8,000. An issue published a few years back in February, our slowest month of the year, consisted of 76 tabloid pages, of which 56 percent was advertising [...]
A very different and much briefer experience I bring to this chapter is the time I spent in the countries of former Yugoslavia, from November 1997 through September 1998 as a Knight International Journalism Fellow. I talked with and attempted to offer helpful suggestions to the publishers of several independent newspapers scattered across Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. What I mostly learned, of course, is that these publishers faced problems I had never encountered in my 35 years in the business, and devotedly hope I never will. But I was able to make a few general observations. These were courageous individuals; dedicated and experienced journalists. Most of them were going broke because they couldn’t sell enough advertising to pay the bills [...]
Community newspapers have held their audience and advertisers better than most because they are intensely local, and some larger papers are trying to mimic that model (going “hyper-local”). Regardless, most newspapers can exploit online platforms as extensions of their printed editions. What follows is written in the hopeful belief that if publishers in emerging democracies embrace this role, and carry it to their potential advertisers, one small business at a time, they will have a fighting chance to construct a press which will be truly independent of the immense economic and political forces that attempt to control events across their nations, and across the world." (Introduction, pages 4-6)