The entire industry was stunned when WEHCO Media announced
they were planning to stop printing their flagship statewide newspaper, The
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and only deliver it to their subscribers via a paid
web/ APP based platform. After many market tests, their final solution to keep
their audience was to purchase iPads and offer them to their print subscribers
for free. Now more than a year later, the paper publishes just one print
product a week, while profiting and retaining more than 70 percent of their
audiences and saving hundreds of jobs as well.
E and P publisher Mike Blinder
checks in with Walter E. Hussman Jr., WEHCO’s CEO and publisher of the
Democrat-Gazette, to see how the project is going and how they have expanded
the concept to other WEHCO properties. Hussman also chats about his thoughts on
moving newspapers to non-profit status, surviving in a COVID-19 world, and if
Facebook and Google should pay for the content they receive from the news
publishing industry.
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