Page 30 - Delaware Lawyer - Fall 2023

FEATURE
Delaware
Allison Taylor Levine
Spotlight
Creating a new, sustainable model for journalism in Delaware
Twenty years ago, if you were to wander down the stairs and through the cafeteria inside Legislative Hall in Dover, you’d find a small press room packed with journalists — reporters from The News Journal, The Delaware State News, the Associated Press, WDEL, WILM, WHYY and more, fighting for scoops and sources and asking public officials questions they didn’t always want to answer.
At the time, more than 110 report- ers, photographers, clerks and copy editors worked just in the news- room of The News Journal.
Today, there are fewer than 30.
The same is true for virtually every legacy news source in Delaware, whether it’s a daily newspaper or a radio station.
The decline and fall of the news industry is no longer news, and the culprit is not exactly a mystery. The internet changed everything about the business model for newspapers, more radically than most people realize.
A simple truth: In 2003, simple classified ads in three segments — em- ployment, housing and automotive — accounted for nearly 50% of the total revenue at any given newspaper. It was
those classified ads — more than sub- scription fees, more than display ads, more than Sunday inserts — that paid for reporters to sit in school board meetings, attend land use hearings, lis- ten in on the Joint Finance Committee, scan court dockets for stories, and be on the scene when major news broke.
In the space of just a few short years, almost all of that revenue vanished. And it’s not coming back. Ever.
If unbiased, accurate, robust report- ing is going to proliferate once again, the news needs a new business model.
For the past five years, the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) has been exploring ways to support the existing
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