So you want a journalism job? Buy one. (With podcast.)

By Darren Johnson
Campus News and CampusXM.com

I want you to listen to my podcast on this subject. Find it here.

In the photo above, you’ll see the before-and-after screenshots of an historic, struggling newspaper I’d recently bought and then redesigned.

It’s a paid-circulation, historic small-town community paper called The Journal & Press based in Upstate New York, not far from Saratoga Springs.

As you may also know, I own a free paper, Campus News, which hits 37 colleges, mostly in the New York Metro Region. It’s in its 10th year and continues to buck the “death-of-newspapers” group-think going on in media nowadays.

The Journal & Press, though, brings a new challenge. It has spiraled to near oblivion in the past decade. I had helplessly watched that decline, as I live in the town it’s based in, but the various owners it has had were not selling (they’d say, whenever I’d ask), and I was busy enough with Campus News, anyway.

But then the latest owner of The Journal & Press declared the paper was going out of business — and I bought it the day after Thanksgiving of this past year.

In my earlier years, I had worked in community newspaper newsrooms, and my Campus News model allows some efficiencies, so I feel I have enough overall knowledge to turn The Journal & Press around.

In this podcast, I:

• Discuss how papers like The Journal & Press are available to purchase all over the country. Lots of small papers are going out of business. Perhaps recent journalism grads or displaced journalists who worked for corporately owned papers should consider buying one.
• Opine on how much one should pay for such a paper.
• Give details as to all that’s involved with owning a smalltown paper.
• Discuss redesigning the paper, and perhaps changing price, size (tabloid or broadsheet) and frequency. Should you do this right away, or wait awhile and ease readers into the changes?
• Rant on the snobbery some journalists have about “chicken dinner” newspapers. You know, once you own the paper, you can make it whatever you want? There’s no reason to be a snob. Don’t like chicken-dinner stories? Do something better!
• Give some examples of people I know who took over a struggling paper, or started their own, and now make a decent living from it.
• Discuss the different models of newspapers; paid and free, weekly, bi-weekly and monthly.
• Explore ways to find new subscribers and markets for the paper.

All that — in about 37 minutes! It’s a cup of coffee!

So give the podcast a listen! Here it is on iTunes. And if you are thinking of doing something like this and want advice, contact me at CampusXM@cccn.us.