Inside LINK is a regular column from our CEO, Lacy Starling. If you have questions you’d like Lacy to answer, email her at lacy@linknky.com.
My dad had a saying growing up. (He had lots of sayings, as dads do.)
“Money is like sex,” he’d say. “The people who talk about it all the time are the ones who don’t have it.”
Well, folks, I’m here to talk about money, and we know what that means – I don’t have it.
But before I get to the money part, some recent history.
When we started LINK nky two years ago, I told the managing board the thing that scared me about doing this was creating a news organization in 2021. The landscape was pretty bleak for local news, and to think that we could be successful in that environment felt a bit like hubris.
But I believed in the mission and in the Northern Kentucky community’s willingness to support that mission.
Fast-forward two years, and we’ve done it. We’ve successfully launched and grown a local news organization where one did not exist before. I’m so proud of what we’ve done here in the NKY Metro.
However, the landscape for local news has only gotten more bleak. Poynter last week reported that the US lost more than two local newspapers a week in 2023. That means two communities like ours, every single week, lost their source of local news and information.
Northern Kentucky knows what it feels like to lose your local newspaper. When the Post shut down, something vital in NKY left with it. That loss nearly 17 years ago still feels fresh for many people, and we hear about it in our focus groups and conversations with community members daily.
Losing a newspaper in your town isn’t just about losing the news. Losing a newspaper means losing the connection to your friends and neighbors and your local schools. It means losing accountability for local politicians and business leaders. It means losing information about candidates for office and even having fewer candidates to choose from.
Why is this happening? Why are local newspapers shutting down at a faster rate than ever before? As with most things, it’s complicated, and it is a combination of factors.
- 2023 was a tough year for advertising revenue. Many companies pulled back advertising spend because they feared a recession, which thankfully didn’t materialize. However, there’s no way to go back and recoup those lost months of revenue.
- Social media continues to cannibalize revenue. Another Poynter study this month estimated that Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company) owe US news publishers about $14 billion a year for the content we create that they get to use for free. People overwhelmingly get their news through social media, because organizations like LINK post our content there. But we don’t make a penny off that – Google and Meta get to use the journalism we produce for free to bring people to their sites, and then they sell advertising based on how many people come to their sites to consume that news and information. They make money off of what we create, and we are left holding the bill.
- People have gotten used to getting their news for free. Whenever someone tells me they love what LINK is doing because they missed the Post, I always ask if they donate to our digital site or have a subscription to our print paper. Because they certainly didn’t get the Post for free – they had to subscribe. The reason newspapers used to be able to succeed financially was in large part due to subscription revenue. Without subscriptions or a digital paywall, it is incredibly difficult to create a sustainable revenue model. LINK has chosen not to have a digital paywall because we don’t want folks to have to choose between getting the news and getting groceries, but that doesn’t eliminate the need to find that revenue somewhere.
I could go on for pages, but the net is this – it is HARD to create a sustainable, comprehensive local news organization. To do so requires community will, and financial support.
(Here comes the money part. Sorry, dad.)
At our 2nd birthday party in October, we announced that a generous member of the community had given us a $75,000 challenge grant for our annual fundraising campaign. In order to get the full $75,000 grant, we had to raise another $75,000 from other people in the community. To date, we’ve raised a little over $25,000.
That’s more successful than any other fundraising campaign we’ve had to date, and it still isn’t enough. We need more help. We need more people who see the value in what we do to chip in. We have more than 50,000 unique visitors to our site a week, and most of them come back again and again throughout the month, so we know people find our work valuable. We just need more of them to support the work.
The support doesn’t have to be huge – just $5 a month, every month, helps us accomplish our mission. That’s less than you’ll pay for any of our competitors or for a digital subscription to a national news outlet. And frankly, given the quality of our work, it’s a steal.
So please, if you find value in LINK, if you find value in the work of local news, help us beat the national trend and grow local news instead of shrinking it or losing it altogether. We can absolutely set an example for the country for how it can be done.
You can donate here. You can subscribe to our print edition here. And you can always reach me directly at lacy@linknky.com if you’d like to make a more significant contribution.
LINK will not thrive without community support – no local news publication can. Please consider giving, if you can.
