THE WASHINGTON INFORMER HAS ADDED SUBSCRIBERS AND STAFF IN AN ERA WHEN MANY LOCAL NEWSPAPERS ARE STRUGGLING
As owner and publisher of the Washington Informer, Denise Rolark Barnes faces many of the challenges putting local newspapers out of business: fickle revenue streams, aging readership and the rise of social media as a primary source of news, just to name a few, The Washington Post reported on December 28 in an article written by Columnist Courtland Milloy.
Between 2005 and the start of the pandemic, about 2,100 newspapers closed their doors, according to Margaret Sullivan, media critic for The Washington Post and author of the book “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.” Since covid-19 struck, she says, at least 80 more papers have gone out of business, as have an undetermined number of other local publications.
And yet in the past five years, the Informer, which is focused primarily on the region’s Black community, has been undergoing an impressive expansion. Readership for the D.C.-based weekly has nearly doubled to roughly 50,000. Unlike some local newspapers, which have shrunk to the size of a supermarket supplement, the Informer has grown from an average 36 pages per issue to 56 pages.
Asked what was driving the Informer’s resurgence, Rolark Barnes said: “People are finally waking up to the importance of local news. As a result, local newspapers like ours are becoming eligible for grants, partnerships and other philanthropic dollars that weren’t available before.”
The Informer is also part of a consortium of 10 legacy Black newspapers that recently created a content-sharing website called Word in Black. “We’re the youngest paper in the group; that kind of cooperation really helps us,” Rolark Barnes said. See complete Washington Post article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/12/28/washington-informer-local-news-growing/?fbclid=IwAR2FFw7EVOTubcdEHIxdES1lTPJxGv8WK-PdgBgAmmcmWbvs1fb7SkgMkoA
