Opportunities missed: The untapped potential in local U.S. newspapers’ appeals for financial support

Abstract

The continuing disappearance of local news outlets, accelerated by a sharp decline in print advertising revenues, has profound detrimental effects on democracy and community life. Yet, most Americans remain unaware of the financial struggles facing their local news organizations, and even fewer support newspapers through subscriptions and donations. As a result, a growing number of studies have been calling on scholarship to provide theoretically informed and empirically based insights that could help news organizations ensure financial support from their communities. This study responds to that call by content-analyzing the local newspapers’ public-facing appeals for subscriptions and donations—two major non-advertising revenue sources—through the lens of two disciplines: journalism studies, which treats such appeals as sites of metajournalistic discourse, and marketing, which approaches them as artifacts of persuasive communication. Based on a nationally representative sample of local U.S. newspapers' appeals (N = 1374), the findings indicate that the appeals fail to articulate the value of local journalism as a democratically and civically vital institution and, despite being conceptualized as such, do not leverage the empirically validated principles of effective persuasive communication, such as reciprocity, consistency, scarcity, liking, authority, and social proof. Nor do they align with factors that have been demonstrated in prior research to influence audience willingness to pay for local news. This suggests that local news organizations are underutilizing these sites of metajournalistic discourse to attract support from potential subscribers and donors, which contributes to undermining their sustainability amid mounting financial pressures.