Sourcing Innovation from a ‘Rural Journalism Lab’

With Andrea Wenzel

When brothers Dustin and Lee Bratcher launched the hyperlocal, digital news outlet The Ohio County Monitor in 2012, their goal was to make local accountability reporting more cost-effective, accessible, and timely. In rural Ohio County, Kentucky, home to 24,000 residents spanning 600 square miles, the local economy was once built on manufacturing, coal mining, and agriculture—with many family farms focused on tobacco. More than 20 percent of the county’s population lives in poverty, and the mean per capita income is around $20,000, so people struggle to add additional monthly bills to the mix. 

Without the need for expensive infrastructure to produce a print publication, The Monitor focused on the business proposition that low overhead and operational costs ($10,000 per year, including rent, computers, web resources, and contingency funds for technological challenges or upgrades) means even a moderate level of advertising revenue would keep them afloat.

But with a readership spread across hundreds of rural square miles, selling advertising was tough. Chain stores in the county center dominate local sales, and The Monitor couldn’t compete with the targeting options and efficiencies of sites like Facebook and Google when it came to local businesses with finite digital advertising budgets.

That’s why, last summer, the Bratchers made the switch to a subscription model. Getting a steady stream of monthly viewers hasn’t been a problem. Since 2012, The Monitor has seen its traffic build quickly and maintain steadily. By the time it officially moved to a subscription-based business, it already had close to 10,000 Facebook likes and was getting, on average, between 30,000 and 40,000 unique monthly visitors. But would people be willing to pay for their local news?

Building on our previous research through the Tow Center and aworkshop we held in August 2017 on strengthening storytelling networks and civic engagement in this region of Kentucky, over the past few months we embarked on a series of experiments with the Bratchers in what we’ve coined a “rural journalism innovation lab.” Our work explored a range of approaches—around promotion, news products, and community engagement—aimed at driving residents into a deeper relationship with The Ohio County Monitor and supporting the outlet’s move to a $5-monthly subscription model, supported by very limited advertising.

What we found is that while Facebook drives the most traffic to the site, its algorithm over-prioritizes local crime stories from The Monitor, pushing stories into local residents’ feed that don’t drive the kind of readership likely to translate to subscriptions. A number of Facebook ad spends to promote Monitor-sponsored events and gift subscriptions also weren’t useful in getting people to show up or subscribe. Thus far, livestreaming community events has proved unreliable, due to unpredictable internet connectivity at venues in the rural county, and a weekly podcast was hard to promote and challenging for readers to discover and follow.

We saw the most promise from two pilot projects focused on community traditions—a community contributor program and a “liars table tour,” which involved traveling to convenience stores in various rural towns around the county where people already tended to gather. A subsequent piece in this series will cover each of these experiments in more depth. However, in the 12-day period after we ran five community contributor pieces, The Monitor received 13 new subscribers—a third of the 39 subscribers it added during our period of experimentation.

Read more at Columbia Journalism Review.