An accounting and an appeal to your generosity

After reviewing the books through July, it seems like a good time to offer a mid-year accounting and make an earnest appeal for community journalism.

We’re keeping our noses just above the whitecaps, thanks to your subscriptions and donations. We’ve beefed up our local news reporting, adding feet to the street and field in Storm Lake and Cherokee. We were delighted to recently welcome two new reporters to the Storm Lake Times Pilot and Cherokee Chronicle Times: Allison Moore, a spring graduate of Grinnell College; and Madeline Combs, a freshly minted alumna of the University of St. Thomas (my alma mater, roll Purple Tide).

They join a staff of 18 people devoted to bringing you the best community newspapers anywhere.

The Brothers Cullen doubled down on a big bet in Northwest Iowa a couple years ago when we bought the Storm Lake Pilot-Tribune, Advertising Guide and Chronicle Times, in the midst of a journalism beat-down. We decided to expand our reporting and our digital offerings on the belief that readers would respond with paid subscriptions.

They have. Our paid circulation has steadily grown — from zero to over 300 digital subscribers in Cherokee, and doubling our digital subscriber base to 1,200 for the Times Pilot. Print circulation for each newspaper has remained steady while digital circulation has grown rapidly.

Over the past month we launched new websites with increased digital offerings. Readers are responding. We are grateful.

At the same time, we have watched advertising revenue slide across the newspaper industry as Google is found to be a monopoly. Postal rates are exploding — two big increases last year. Newspapers are closing in rural communities across the country amid this squeeze, leaving informed civic discourse in a vacuum.

We remain barely in the black, warily watching.

We wonder if the days of the mass-market free shoppers like the Ad Guide are numbered without the car dealers and grocery inserts. Years ago the Ad Guide would run 24 pages, this spring we saw far too many six-page editions. No other advertising medium reaches every household in Cherokee and Storm Lake like the Ad Guide — not Facebook or TikTok or ESPN. The postal bill is huge and unsustainable at this rate.

It also makes us question whether we can afford to print the Times Pilot twice a week. We could save a lot of postage expense by putting out a fat weekend paper once a week that has all the news. Advertisers are not necessarily demanding a Wednesday edition, according to the ad log. Circulation in Cherokee has increased 25% since the Chronicle Times went to weekly printing. Readers prefer it, along with a website that posts news as it happens daily.

These are things we think about when we cannot sleep. We’re not there yet. We can maintain our publishing regime for the time being. We recognize that our future is coming to you through your cellphone along with a printed product. People like print on paper. They also like news on demand. Neither is free.

Jamie Knapp and Adam Dublinske are on the sidelines every Friday night. Dolores Cullen and Erin Rydgren are at the fairs and community events. Tom Cullen keeps tabs on local government in two counties. We offer informed commentary that won a Pulitzer Prize. If it’s a spaghetti supper or a blue ribbon, it’s in the paper.

We manage to stay afloat by growing paid subscriptions and seeking donations.

The Times Pilot and Chronicle Times combined reach nearly 5,000 households. That number needs to increase to about 7,000 over the next three years to make up for lost advertising revenue from print that is not coming back. We think we can do that in a market with roughly 13,000 households, if we can maintain our subscription growth rate over the past couple years.

In the meantime, in addition to your subscription we need donations. We will break even come hell or high water. John and I are well-versed in survival. In order to grow, and pay our excellent staff a living wage, we need something more than break-even. Adding staff and building a website and maintaining print editions costs money that we do not have.

That’s why we ask that you consider a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation, a non-profit organized to support rural community journalism. We depend on support from the foundation to cover all those school boards, volleyball games and city council meetings. Nobody else does what we do. We are the conduit for local democracy.

Ultimately we can reach our readership goals through expanding our journalism and improving our digital offerings. In the near term, over the next few years, we must depend on philanthropy to help us until we can get the platform built. Please give what you can at www.westerniowajournalismfoundation.com. 

These appeals unfortunately have become necessary. We beg your indulgence and understanding as we do our level best to give you a complete picture of life in Northwest Iowa.

Thank you.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please pick five you’d like to support by becoming paid. It helps keep them going. Enjoy: