Against the familiar newsmedia context of aggregation and asset-stripping, lessons are emerging in regional USA of a new business approach.

This week, we’ve news of a new print site being commissioned in Denver to fill the gap – for independent publishers – of the closure of a Gannett site. Providing the cash is the National Trust for Local News, which relies on the financial support of 28 institutions and as many individuals in Colorado, Maine, Georgia, and around the country to create a new future for community news.

They’re by no means the first of what is a growing movement placing the needs of communities – and the importance of local news – ahead of corporate pressures.

NTLN has become a focus for philanthropic support of local media, but says it’s not necessarily about solving a business model but an “ownership incentive problem”.

Experience in Australia has shown the problem of corporate investors not wanting to invest in print – or at least, printed newspapers – with digital the fashionable option. Fairfax Media went that way, as did former regional publisher APN (now ARN Media).

The US National Trust now owns 65 newspapers across its three focus states, with 500 staff, about half of which Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire says are journalists, a contrast to the balance within many other publishers. Importantly, it has 100,000 paying subscribers and 2.5 million monthly visitors in addition to its print products, 300,000 copies of which are distributed monthly.

Scire points to the June launch of the weekly Macon Melody, launched into what she called a “news desert”, albeit one with a paper owned by the hedge fund-owned McClatchy newspaper group.

At the Online News Association’s annual conference earlier this year, NTLC first portfolio officer and former McClatchy executive Ross McDuffie pointed to the conflict of interest between shareholders and readers, arguing that ““the incentive structure” of hedge fund-owned newspapers was broken.

Not that either is saying that the McClatchy paper doesn’t carry local news; only that the area, “deserves an obsessively local news brand”. What he is saying is that decisions taken to maximise shareholder value, seldom align with individual community needs”.

While the trust has raised an estimated US$38 million (A$61.12 million) in philanthropic support, its goal is to build community news organisations that don’t rely on institutional philanthropy. Meanwhile, support including US$5 million (A$8 million) from the Knight Foundation helped it buy 18 Georgia newspapers earlier this year, the same organisation helping with the Macon launch. Among the benefits its chief executive Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro says it offers are buying power and management expertise.

McDuffie says print still drives nearly three-quarters of total revenue – despite subscriptions being outpaces two-to-one by digital – and reckons it will still be a part of the identity in ten or 20 years time.

The trust’s overall strategy is to focus on smaller communities – typically those with fewer than 50,000 residents – which would be “very hard to serve with a true startup”, and McDuffie stresses the importance of “small-j journalism” – community journalism that may not win a Pulitzer, but builds trust.

It’s hard to compare the US situation with that in Australia, with its dominant news publisher – which also happens to be its dominant newspaper printer – faced nationally by only a couple of other players, if that.

There’s been comment that the Albanese seems finally to have come to value regional media, supporting it with cash handouts and the new News Media Relief programme, which subsidises digital journalists in the coming year… which just happens to be one in which a federal election will be required to be held.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: A promotion for the Macon Melody, and (below) editor Caleb Slinkard with the first edition and a “newspaper” he created as a 13-year-old