Complete Story
05/16/2017
The Facebook rescue that wasn’t
From The Columbia Journalism Review
If you go to the homepage of the Watershed Post, the online news source for the Catskill region of upstate New York, there are plenty of stories about rural regeneration: agritourism and a new creamery, the ongoing political wrangling over the development of the Belleayre ski resort, property ads where prices are significantly up from a few years ago. But one part of the region’s fortunes is not reviving: the Watershed Post itself.
The first post on the page, and perhaps the last post for the publication, is a long and eloquent letter from the publisher, editor, and founder, Lissa Harris, explaining why the outlet is slowing down:
We have a great local audience that is hungry for news. . . . But I feel the writing is on the wall for digital display advertising, our main revenue stream for supporting online news. I see more and more small businesses taking money they would once have spent with local news outlets, and spending it on digital ads—not on local websites, but on promoted Facebook posts and Google keyword advertising.
As a business person, I can’t argue with that. It works. The titans of the Web have huge and increasing reach, even in our rural communities. They have sophisticated tools for targeting likely customers by geography and demographics. They have products that a business owner can buy for $5 with a few clicks of a mouse, products that require no human time investment on the other end for design or sales or customer support.
The Watershed Post, with 50,000 monthly readers, half within the region and half from outside, is not unusual. Only 15 percent of local news organizations are independently owned and operated, and the pattern of consolidation or closure is rapidly claiming more single-owner or family news businesses. What is unusual is that when the Watershed Post was started in 2010, it represented a version of the future of journalism that was supposed to work: a wholly digital operation built to thrive on the open Web. Harris knew both the region and the communications business in depth. A Catskill native who took up journalism while attending Cornell, she studied science writing as a grad student at MIT and worked for alt-weeklies in Boston before returning to the Catskill town of Margaretville. Her great-great-grandfather John Birdsall founded the Margaretville Telephone Company in 1916, and she felt it was her calling to return home and cover news “for regular people,” as she describes them.
