Village Soup Reinvigorating Newspapers Through Online News in Maine
Editor’s note: Gary Kebbel is the Journalism Program Director for Knight Foundation. Below, he talks about Village Soup, which has recently received coverage for reinvigorating print circulation through an online model.
Village Soup is using its strength as a digital news, information and advertising platform to preserve and strengthen the information flow in communities in MidCoast Maine.
The company has bought six failing weekly newspapers and plans to strengthen and integrate them into the successful Village Soup online news group. Village Soup owns two other newspapers that it started to reverse-publish content from two local online Village Soup sites.
Village Soup is a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner with a proposal to re-create its successful digital platform in open-source code so that other communities easily could start online news sites.
You can read a recent article on Village Soup and their recent acquisition here; for more, visit the Village Soup site.
What do you think about this “technology version of your basic man-bites-dog story”?
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July 11th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
If you count Village Soup’s two money losing papers that makes 8 in the same market. The fact is they weren’t losing out to online competition but rather to other newspapers that consistently won awards and have been profitable. Sounding the death knell for print, particularly weeklies in Maine, is premature. It is also counterintuitive to issue a press release about buying newspapers and then spend a lot of time talking about how it is a dieing industry.
July 12th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Thanks for your comment, David.
I don’t know that we’re sounding death knells here, and rather that it’s an interesting, reversed situation in this specific case.
Do you agree that the need for news continues?
November 26th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
So far all this grant has funded is the continued war of attrition against print journalists in Maine. Since June Village Soup has laid off nearly 40 people from
Courier Publications and has killed off three weeklies including one of their own in Belfast, the another, the Waldo Independent and, in November the Camden Herald. After buying Courier they killed its website and then put nothing back for three months. Their “community” has promised much but so far has only delivered less competition for news, fewer independent voices, and fewer opportunities for working journalists.