County newspaper eyes changes for the future
May 2—With an eye to the future, Dale Worley, owner of JLS Group, is consolidating the internet presence of the publications Dickinson County News-Times, Lincoln Sentinel-Republican, and the Hill City Times.
JLS group will continue to print the three weekly newspapers but the website will shift to a regional news service making the digital version of all the papers available to all subscribers.
The coverage area Worley is focusing on will include Dickinson, Lincoln, Ottawa, Graham and Rooks counties.
"It'll bleed over just like our coverage does with the newspapers, to a certain degree," he said.
The move comes as the cost of printing and mailing newspapers continues to rise. Unlike regular first-class mail, newspapers must be mailed from the city in which the main office is located. For Worley, that means driving to Hill City, Lincoln, and Herington every Tuesday to deliver papers to the post offices in those towns.
"We've had multiple postage increases in the last three or four years," he said. "Plus, there's delivery issues with people being able to get their papers in a timely fashion."
Adding to the problems of rising costs, advertising revenue which had been the lifeblood of the newspaper industry dropped significantly in the past couple of decades. A 2021 article in Forbes revealed a decline in ad revenue from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $8.8 billion in 2020.
Pew Research Center also found that for the first time, newspapers in 2020 generated more revenue from circulation than from advertising. But that does not equate to more readers. In 1990, the weekday newspaper circulation in the U.S. was higher than 60 million. By 2020 it dropped to just under 21 million.
"In the future, the larger and more financially successful newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) will be more reliant on (digital) circulation for revenue rather than advertising," Forbes reported. "For smaller newspapers without a national brand, it will be more of a challenge."
Worley, who has worked in the newspaper industry since he was 15 years old, hopes to meet that challenge but it means changing the way he has operated since he bought his first newspaper in 1987.
"We're still doing business like we did in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s," he said.
That business model is broken. A June 2022 Penny Abernathy's report on local news found more than 360 newspapers had closed since 2019.
"We are operating in a digital world," he said. "Every newspaper, and media in general, will have to go to a digital format. I'm trying to set this up for down the road when it's not cost-effective to mail and deliver papers, we will still have enough area-wide Kansas news to make this something that will survive into the future."
