Viewpoint: An All-Digital Newspaper?

One of our advertisers and a person I consider a close friend, called me last week and said he had something he wanted to ask me. I don’t know about you but when somebody tells me they want to ask me something, rather than just ask me, well I get a little anxious.

But I told him to ask away. He said that he had heard from two different sources that the Greenhorn Valley View was going to quit having a print edition and go to a digital only format. He needed to know if that was true. To his credit, he wouldn’t reveal the sources.

Do you remember in late July of last year when we, as a community, learned that in September the Pueblo Chieftain was going to shut down their printing press and ninety publications including ours would be looking for a home and a place to print?

During the initial search we literally found no one that we could afford to work with. Negotiations had begun with Santa Fe, but they were trying to figure out how many people from the Chieftain would print with them and were slow, at best, to give us a price.

For about five minutes when it looked like we might have to close the paper, we considered going all digital (no printing cost, shipping, or postage). Due to our knowledge about our readers’ preferences, along with a concrete number from Santa Fe that was high but not entirely beyond reach, the digital idea went into the digital trash can.

We are a niche market. We cater to people who live in the Greenhorn Valley and focus on local events and local people. So, while some figures I have read from the Pew Research Center show that digital only subscriptions are rising between 20-25% in many urban markets, our digital only subscriptions are well below 10%. Our digital and print subscriptions are nearing the mid-teens as a percentage.

Newspapers are fascinating to me. The Western Kansas World in my hometown of WaKeeney, Kansas published their first issue on March 21, 1885. It’s predecessor, the WaKeeney Weekly World had been published since March 1879.

I have a number of issues of state wide papers from Kansas, yellowed and crackly but still able to be read, in storage marking historical events. The Topeka-Daily Capital was the paper we went to for state and national news and in my pile, I have the issue proclaiming that the accused slayer of President John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been slain himself, by Jack Ruby.

A St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan since childhood, I have the newspaper heralding both the 1964 and 1967 seventh game World Series Championships for the Cardinals. Those were both spawned in an era when I spent many a night listening to a device known as an AM radio to hear the games live from St. Louis.

President Richard Nixon’s resignation, Communist Russia’s Premier Khruschev’s threat to bury us all, and the death of President Dwight David Eisenhower who claimed Abilene, Kansas as his home are all available to verify significant moments in history.

Man’s walking on the moon, Hank Aaron’s record setting homerun, and Cassius Clay’s knock down of Sonny Liston are available with only a few minutes of looking.

We have kept a few copies of every issue we have published of the View along with collecting, through people kind enough to donate them, issues published before we owned the paper.

Henry Ward Beecher said, “ The newspaper is a greater treasure to the people than uncounted millions of gold.” And President Thomas Jefferson said, ” Were it left to me to decide if we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Have I answered the question?