Stephen Crane knows some people think he’s out of his mind.
It’s July 2025, and he’s celebrating the second anniversary of his passion project: the Morgan County Correspondent, a weekly newspaper he started to provide coverage of his hometown county to the southwest of Indianapolis.
A county of 73,000 people with both suburban and rural enclaves, Crane couldn’t stand seeing the two papers in his community — the Gannett-owned Mooresville Times and the Reporter-Times — become ghost papers. So in 2023, he and eight other community members pooled their money together to start The Correspondent.
So why do people think he’s crazy?
In an age of countless digital startups, the Morgan County Correspondent prints every week.
“I know what we’re doing is certainly, not just atypical but outlandish in the minds of some,” Crane said in a phone interview.
But for someone who knows the community as well as Crane does — he grew up there, after all — it’s hard to push back on his judgment.
Currently, the paper has about 2,100 subscribers, 96% of which are for print, and Crane said they’re approaching profitability. In fact, they’ve had several months since last fall in the black.
“Our approach certainly would not work in other places in other larger markets for sure,” he said. “But knowing the particulars here given my own experience in those rural communities, that was our hunch, and we’re seeing that dream turn to reality, and the hunch is paying off.”
Crane isn’t the only one in the news industry with a hunch that there’s still a role for print, as conversations with two other very different organizations validated.
The Morgan County Correspondent, The Record North Shore and the Tampa Bay Times could not be more different from each other. While The Correspondent is a two-year-old for-profit print product serving a small county in Indiana, The Record North Shore began in 2020 as a nonprofit, online-only publication serving the north suburbs of Chicago. And, of course, the Tampa Bay Times is a legacy outlet that’s covered the Tampa Bay region for nearly 150 years; during the pandemic, they cut back from printing seven days a week to just twice weekly.
For publications across the country encountering declining print subscriptions, increased costs and a quickly changing news consumption landscape, ceasing or drastically cutting print production might seem like a logical step. But for some outlets, it’s not that simple.
Keeping print — or even adding print products — enables publishers to bolster advertising revenue. While print ads cost businesses more than digital ads, they also tend to offer a higher return on investment. There’s more permanence to them—think about a newspaper sitting on the table at a coffee shop or a doctor’s office compared to quickly scrolling through an article on the internet—and research has found that consumers trust ads in print products more than they trust digital ads. And for local news outlets especially, local businesses might see greater value in advertising upcoming events and sales in the next edition of the paper than they would on a website.
In addition to ads, print products can serve as an effective marketing tool to simultaneously reach consumers less familiar with an outlet’s digital products and to direct them to those platforms. They also serve older consumers used to getting their news through print newspapers, and the more than roughly 20 million Americans who lack broadband access — particularly in rural and Tribal communities.
All three organizations Medill spoke with demonstrate that even in a time where news distribution is rapidly evolving through online platforms and social media, print still matters. Each outlet might not use it the same way, but as these three newspapers — that differ widely in size, age and audience — show, print can still be a key tool to reach and grow audiences.
“What we find is that people really enjoy the habit of reading news,” said Tampa Bay Times Chairman and CEO Conan Gallaty. “In a world where there is no shortage of information, there’s no lack of deep scrolling that goes on and on and on, having a linear, finite, scheduled delivery of a news product has a lot of value in people’s lives.”
The Record Express
At first glance, The Record North Shore would seem to be among the least likely publications to spend any time thinking about a print product. Co-founder Joe Coughlin started the outlet with the help of some of his colleagues who he worked with at 22nd Century Media, which folded in 2020. For most of The Record’s five-year run, the focus of Coughlin and Ryan Osborn, the director of development, has been on “modern” media tools — their website, newsletters and podcasts.
But in November 2024, they began to embark on a new experiment: a monthly printed paper called The Record Express, distributed for free at Central Station Coffee in Wilmette, Ill. one of the communities in their coverage area.
Why’d they do it?
“As we started engaging with more of our communities, you really do hear from folks who aren’t as digitally native as you may think,” Osborn said. “As a nonprofit newsroom serving 85,000 people daily, to really reach all different kinds of folks, we know we have to extend the mission beyond just publishing on a website and newsletters.”
“The future is no doubt digital,” he added. “But as we really did get out and listen to the community, we heard pretty clearly that people wanted to touch the information that we produce in their hands, and being able to maybe serve some folks who aren’t immersed in the digital world as much as we all may think has really been an effective way for us to reach more people.”
The Record’s print product, focused on one community, is done nowhere near at the scale of the Tampa Bay Times or even the Morgan County Correspondent. But it still serves an audience.
They print 400 copies each month to distribute at the coffee shop — where Coughlin works from regularly — and the nearby train station. There are never any left over.
It’s by no means The Record’s primary revenue generator, but it’s had the dual benefit of bringing in some more advertising dollars and serving as a tactful marketing tool to broaden their reach in the community.
“The most rewarding and fulfilling experiences have been people who’ve picked up the paper who hadn’t heard of The Record who now have reached out to us and become members, have become donors, have had story ideas,” Osborn said. “The value that those things have brought has really been, I’d say, almost invaluable.”
‘A shared experience’
While The Correspondent and The Record have added print, the Tampa Bay Times has shifted in the opposite direction. When Gallaty joined the organization in 2018 as chief digital officer, discussions about pivoting to more digitally focused products had already begun.
Then COVID-19 struck, advertising dollars vanished overnight, and the Times had to shift more abruptly than anticipated, ultimately deciding to cut back their print paper from seven days a week to just two.
“Would our readers stay with us if we only delivered twice a week, but we still provided seven days’ worth of journalism?” Gallaty noted was a key point of debate.
And, he added, what about advertisers? Could they still keep most of them?
For both constituencies, the answers seemed to be yes.
In communicating with readers, Gallaty said they’ve focused on the e-newspaper and newsletters they can access that will still provide them with all of the reporting they were previously reading.
“There [was] definitely a portion of that print readership that was open to the idea. Some of them, quite frankly, had to be forced to do it when they couldn’t get that physical product delivered to their home,” Gallaty said. “We have gotten letters, emails saying, ‘I really didn’t want to do this, but when I discovered it and tried it out, I actually really like it. In fact, in some ways, I like it better.’”
As the organization continues to adjust the role of print in its business model, The Times has also expanded its distribution weeklies, free print products spread across 14 municipalities in the Tampa Bay area. Featuring hyperlocal coverage of topics like local government, schools and road construction, Gallaty said it frees up The Times to focus on more regional issues in the metro paper. He’s hoping these weeklies continue to expand to as many as 20 communities, if not more, in the coming years.
But whether he’s talking to die-hard print subscribers or highlighting the value of their e-newspaper, there’s still a common theme Gallaty likes to point to.
“It’s also a shared experience, which I think is a very under-recognized value of a printed product or these digital products like an e-newspaper or an e-newsletter in that everybody gets the same version,” he said. “When you think about social media, or even news websites, you and I can go to the same site, go to the same social channel and have vastly different experiences. But when you look at products like an e-newspaper or a newsletter, they’re all the same for the audience. Everyone has the same experience, the same information in the same order, and from that, we can have a conversation about what was in it.
“That’s a great value, and I think it’s under-represented in how we talk about this in the industry.”
Community fabric
Analyzing the role of print in the future of news brings two key points to light. While it’s true that overall use of print as a means to consume news continues to decline, a variety of models that incorporate print products can still have merit, as the Morgan County Correspondent, The Record North Shore and the Tampa Bay Times all show.
Still, publishers should proceed with caution, said Chris Krewson, the executive director of LION Publishers, whose organization works with nearly 600 news outlets. All of them prioritize building a digital-focused business, but about a quarter utilize some sort of print product.
“Print will always be part of the mix for publishers, but increasingly it’s a niche product that seems to work best on an occasional schedule or for publications like guides, quarterly reports and the like,” Krewson said via email. “I think any organization that still spends the majority of its time planning on printing anything regularly, indefinitely, is living on borrowed time — the costs are going nowhere but up.”
This line of thinking underscores why The Record North Shore and Tampa Bay Times are still leaning heavily into their digital offerings. It’s also why Crane understands the argument that his endeavor could be doomed to fail.
Regardless of who comes out on the right side of this multidimensional debate, though, the common goal for publishers remains the same: report the facts and inform the public.
“We’re not looking to be William Randolph Hearst. We’re not going to be media moguls,” Crane said. “It really is service-oriented, and journalism, when done well, is a public service at the highest order. You have these communities who care, and the role that the local newspaper plays is truly vital to that community fabric.”
