Kincaid University's auditorium was nearly full Thursday for a panel discussion Dean Priya Sundaram has hosted annually for six years, but this year's installment carried a sharper edge, framed explicitly around whether Bellwater's surviving local news outlets can last another decade.
Dean Priya Sundaram opened the panel by noting that Bellwater remains unusual among comparably sized cities in still having a family-owned daily newspaper, a public radio affiliate producing some local content, and a television station with a substantial news operation. “That’s not luck,” Sundaram told the roughly 200 students, faculty and community members who filled the auditorium. “Or if it is luck, it’s the kind of luck that runs out if nobody pays attention to how it happened.”
A newsroom leader’s blunt assessment
WBHA news director Patrick Ellison, whose station is the only Bellwater television outlet with a substantial news operation, said the station’s ownership by a national conglomerate has been a double-edged sword. “We get resources some local stations our size don’t have,” Ellison said. “We also get budget decisions made by people who have never set foot in Bellwater, and that tension isn’t going away.”
Ellison said WBHA’s local newscast still draws the largest television audience share in the metro area, but that digital advertising revenue continues to erode the margins that fund the newsroom’s roughly 20 reporting positions. He said the station has not had layoffs in three years but declined to say whether that streak was likely to continue.
Public radio’s syndication dilemma
WBOH news director Marguerite Sy said her station’s reliance on NPR and other syndicated public-media programming, while financially necessary, leaves gaps in coverage of hyperlocal Bellwater stories that no other outlet has the staff to fill. “We run maybe six hours of locally produced content a week,” Sy said. “Everything else is syndicated. That’s the honest trade-off of operating on a public radio budget in a city our size.”
That’s not luck. Or if it is luck, it’s the kind of luck that runs out if nobody pays attention to how it happened.
Dr. Priya Sundaram, Dean, Kincaid University School of Communications
The family-owned paper’s advantage, and its limits
A Bellwater Times editor on the panel, speaking about the paper’s ownership structure rather than specific editorial decisions, said the Halloran family’s continued ownership has insulated the newsroom from the private-equity consolidation that has hollowed out newsrooms in many other mid-sized cities. But the editor cautioned that family ownership is not a permanent guarantee, noting that the family sold its television station, WBHA, to a national conglomerate years ago when the economics of local broadcast no longer penciled out for a single family to carry alone.
“Ownership structure buys you time, not immunity,” the editor said. “The same pressures that made television unsustainable for a family to run alone are present in print. We’ve just had more time to adapt because print’s decline has been slower than some people predicted.”
A pipeline problem, not just a business problem
Sundaram used much of her closing remarks to connect the panel’s business concerns back to her own program, noting that Kincaid’s journalism school has recently seen applications rise even as industry hiring has tightened nationally. She said the school has restructured parts of its curriculum around audience-development and local-news business models rather than treating those subjects as electives.
“I can train excellent reporters,” Sundaram said. “What I can’t do alone is guarantee there are viable newsrooms left for them to work in when they graduate. That has to be a shared project between this school, the outlets in this room and, frankly, the community that decides whether local news is worth paying for.”
Several audience members, including a handful of current Kincaid journalism students, pressed the panelists during a question period about whether nonprofit or reader-funded models might eventually be necessary in Bellwater, as they have become in some other cities that lost their daily newspapers entirely. Ellison and the Times editor both said their organizations had discussed nonprofit conversion in the abstract but had no concrete plans to pursue it while current ownership structures remained financially viable.
Sundaram said she plans to publish a summary of the panel’s discussion through the school’s public media policy center and intends to make the future-of-local-news panel a recurring event built around a specific policy question each year rather than a general retrospective.
Students weigh in on their own prospects
Graduate student Priyanka Osei, who is completing her master’s degree at the School of Communications with a concentration in local investigative reporting, said the panel’s tone was more candid than she expected. “I came in assuming I’d hear a lot of reassurance about how local news is resilient,” Osei said. “What I actually heard was three newsroom leaders describe, in pretty specific terms, exactly how fragile the current arrangement is. That’s more useful to me as someone about to enter this field than a pep talk would have been.”
Osei said she has already accepted a reporting position at a regional outlet outside Bellwater after graduation, a decision she said was influenced partly by the relatively limited number of entry-level newsroom openings in the city itself despite Bellwater’s unusually robust local news ecosystem compared with similarly sized cities.
A question of who pays
Ellison and Sy both noted that digital subscription and membership revenue, while growing, still represents a relatively small share of their organizations’ total revenue compared with traditional advertising and, for WBOH, member donations and underwriting. Sy said the station’s membership drives have grown modestly over the past several years but not nearly fast enough to offset the continued erosion of underwriting revenue from local businesses affected by the retail vacancy cycles downtown.
“Everyone on this panel has the same unglamorous answer,” Sy said. “We need more people to directly support the journalism they say they value, whether that’s a subscription, a membership or, in WBHA’s case, just watching the actual newscast instead of getting headlines secondhand from somewhere else. Wanting local news to survive and paying for it are two different behaviors, and right now more people do the first than the second.”