Rural Illinois weekly proves that print story can go viral, even without getting published online - Entrepreneur Generations

Conventional wisdom in modern journalism is that the future is digital, and the bigger your news organization's online footprint, the better. But sometimes that may not be the case for rural papers, which often rely more heavily on print subscriptions and sales and less on digital ads for revenue. However, without a digital presence it's more difficult for a wider audience to hear about an important story. Publishers struggling with that dilemma should consider the following anecdote that shows a rural paper can have its cake and eat it too.

The DuQuoin Weekly in southern Illinois recently broke a big story: state officials had removed a country music band called Confederate Railroad from the DuQuoin State Fair in August because they considered references to the Confederacy racist. But, the paper and its sister publication, the Pinckneyville Press, didn't put the July 3 story on its Facebook page or mostly defunct website because they knew it would hurt paper sales, Jackie Spinner reports for Gateway Journalism Review.

“It didn’t take long for us to learn we were competing with ourselves when we throw stories up on Facebook or on the website," Jeff Egbert, publisher and co-owner of the Weekly and Press newspapers, told Spinner.

The story went viral anyway, as readers shared pictures of the story on social media, which was then picked up by regional, statewide and nationwide news outlets (most crediting the Weekly). "It’s a reminder that for community newspapers, word-of-mouth still goes a long way," Spinner reports.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2jNuysT Rural Illinois weekly proves that print story can go viral, even without getting published online - Entrepreneur Generations

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