Profitable Business
“We’re profitable this year,” he said. “I have a high degree of confidence we will remain profitable next year as well. We’re very high on the industry.”
The paywall has helped support revenue, though the program is still in the early stages, he said. The World-Herald’s circulation, meanwhile, has continued to shrink. It fell 3.2 percent in weekday readership to 130,932 from a year earlier, according to the most recent data from the Alliance for Audited Media. The Sunday edition dropped 2.9 percent to 165,397.
Even if the paywall draws help boost subscriptions, the move is more of a palliative than a cure, Kroeger said.
“We have to get into new businesses,” he said.
One such venture, already under way, aggregates health-care articles from the World-Herald and other Berkshire-owned Nebraska newspapers into a website sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska. The site, which is freely available to readers, has advertising in addition to the sponsorship.
Staying Objective
The risk is that sponsorships jeopardize a newspaper’s objectivity, especially when it comes to medical information, said Todd Gitlin, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
“Medical news is already rigged or bent toward breathless accounts of miracle cures,” Gitlin said. “It’s risky to indulge further in corporate sponsorship.”
Kroeger said the arrangement with Blue Cross doesn’t affect the content.