More Than Just The News

A Website vs. A Newspaper!

I have been advised by "some experts" and friends to only establish a web site! "The web is the way of the further," they tell me, "The internet is killing newspapers!" "Anyway," one said, "They almost always fail."

I was told that newspapers are expensive. They require paper, printing, distribution, and marketing (marketing both regarding distribution and display advertisement sales). Hard copy is not the medium of the present, much less of the future, except in certain instances. There is no doubt that the internet is the best way for a creative person like me to get his message out. The internet reaches the biggest and fastest growing audience, and it is cheap. All the hot new news guys are taking advantage of it. The only hard paper productions that will continue to grow will be the coffee-table-type, high-budget productions and commuter-friendly morning papers. ...and with the new pocket computers, even the morning papers are in trouble.

If I do eventually establish a newspaper, I am told, I will be spending 95% of my time keeping it going and only 1% being creative, which is what I am good at. What I am going to do with the other 4% of my time I don’t know, but my family time will suffer tremendously, they claim.

My audience is, first, the Christian Community, then the lost world. Among Christians, fewer and fewer are involving themselves with the internet because about one third of the internet is pornographic web sites! Just as TV viewer ship has dropped as TV has gotten more "adult" in its programming, participation in the internet has lost and will continue to lose Christian subscribers because of the junk on the internet. The best internet filter is the off button for many families!

Last year the most popular Christian web site on the internet went bankrupt. Ibelieve.com was receiving only 500,000 hits a month. Rushlimbaugh.com gets over a million hits a day! There simply are not enough Christians on the internet to have the same impact a Christian newspaper would have on America.

One of the things I do when I speak at a church is ask who in 

the audience has internet access. I want to plug my web site, www.morethanjustthenews.net. In an average congregation of over 300 in the audience, only four or five people will raise their hands.

I will not reach the other Christians with a web site!

Secondly; newspapers in America are not dying. When radio was invented people said, "Radio will kill newspapers!" When TV was developed, people said, "This will replace newspapers!" Neither statement was true. The wise newspaper publisher uses TV and radio to promote his newspaper just like the wise Radio and TV station manager uses newspapers to promote their stations. The internet can be used in the same way to promote a newspaper. At the end of each article or display advertisement the reader can be encouraged to go to our web site for updates, coupons or more information. This will save room in the newspaper and allow us to cover more news and events, and offer updates until the next edition is published, making the newspaper even more attractive.

Newspaper publishing, according to U.S. Industry & Trade Outlook 2002, is among the largest and most profitable U.S. enterprises. The nation has approximately 1,485 daily newspapers. Although the total number of daily newspapers has declined 16 percent since 1950, the number of morning newspapers has more than doubled. The decline in newspapers has been because of the elimination of the evening editions in a lot of markets.

"Weekly newspapers in America rely almost entirely on revenues from advertising and have benefited from the long-term growth of the economy. While the number of U.S. weekly papers has remained at approximately 8,000 since 1965, average weekly circulation tripled to 75 million in 1999 from 25 million in 1965.

"An expanding U.S. population continues to prefer to purchase the printed edition rather than viewing the electronic edition," U.S. Industry & Trade Outlook 2000 reports.

The web site of the Newspaper Association of America reports that 57 percent of Americans read a newspaper everyday. Yes, this is down from 77 percent in 1970 but readership increases with education, age, income, job responsibility and home value making it the prefect medium for advertising. Total newspaper advertising revenue is up from $4,426 million in 1965 to $46,289 million in 1999.

One of the reasons for the decline in newspaper readership is the obviousness of the liberal agenda many of the large newspapers are promoting. It has effected how they report the news. A Time-Mirror poll found that 66 percent of Americans distrust the media, all media. I have found that many Christians have canceled their subscriptions to the local daily secular newspaper in their towns. I believe that this "lost newspaper readership" can be won back by a product they can trust.

The readership is there but we have to reach our audience where they live, work, worship, and play. A web site won’t do that. There are about 50 Christian newspapers of various quality and formats that are members of the Christian Newspaper Association. Some are supported by advertising. Some are church or denominational supported. Some of these papers are "news" papers. Others are issue or theological in topic. All these papers are tabloids and published monthly. Most are distributed as free counter top newspapers. However, together these 50 or so monthly Christian publications have a combined readership of over 1.1 million. I have targeted the Top 150 Markets in America. I believe that projecting a million newspapers sold a week is a conservative number. USA Today, the nation’s only national newspaper, sells 2.2 million papers a day.

A Christian newspaper can get into places Christian TV, radio, and a web site can not! When I edited The River, I got a phone call one day from a Christian in Japan asking about a subscription for the paper. Someone had found a copy of the newspaper on a jet and given it to him in Japan. At McDonald’s a woman walked up to my table, not knowing I was the editor of the newspaper, and pulled a paper out of her purse. She asked me if I had ever read this newspaper? Another reader made copies of an article I had written about boycotting K-Mart and stuck them on the windshields of the cars in K-mart’s parking lot. I got a phone call from K-Mart’s legal firm for that. Countless parents have told me that they mailed the newspaper to their sons in the military in Europe. Many just found a paper in a restaurant and read it during lunch. One store that sold drinking glasses used old copies on my 

newspaper to rap glasses in for shipping. I would get calls and letters from all over the country about the newspaper. Would I have reached these people with just a web site?

Rather than launch a paper nationwide all at once that would take hundreds of millions of dollars to do, with hundreds of employees, my plan is in several phases. Each phase pays for the next phase. All I need is the start up funding to prime the pump. As for distribution; there are over 4000 Christian bookstores in America that are members of the Christian Bookstore Association. There are another 4000 Christian bookstores that are not members. There are over 1600 Christian radio stations and 242 Christian TV stations in the United States. There are almost 350 Christian colleges and universities. America has over 287,000 churches!

Think about all the thousands of secular outlets like grocery stores, drug stores, secular book stores, etc. Wouldn’t you someday like to be standing in the check out line at the grocery store and have a choice between a Christian newspaper and the likes of The National Enquirer?

My plan is to start small with circulation of 125,000 or so through the Christian bookstores, colleges and universities, and larger churches. Organizing the Top 150 Markets with newspaper racks and our trained teams of reporters will take ten years. At the end of the plan the circulation will exceed one million newspapers sold a week. After we have the whole of America organized as a weekly, we will sit down, and after much prayer, ask ourselves, "What will it take to become a national daily newspaper?"

Would you like to see a nationwide national Christian newspaper one day?