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DU QUOIN, Ill. — It seems counterintuitive now that most people get news from digital devices but an Illinois publisher found success keeping his newspaper almost entirely offline, and away from Facebook as much as possible.
Jeff Egbert decided it’s more profitable to run the Perry County Weekly-Press without a website. That requires people to buy a copy or subscribe, and makes it harder to copy and republish his work online.
“I get a lot of grief from my journalism friends about that,” he said. “But we had one for a while, and I was killing my rack sales because we put our two or three big stories up for the week on the website. Well, there was no reason for anybody to go buy the paper.”
The decision paid off. The Weekly-Press is profitable and surviving in a state that saw more newspaper closures than any other in recent years, including more than a dozen over the last year in the southern region that includes Perry County, according to research by Northwestern University’s Medill School.
Closing a website is an extreme response to the ephemeral audience and persistent thievery online that have challenged newspapers’ evolution into largely digital operations. Most are staking their future on websites, apps and electronic delivery, as people read less printed material and spend more time looking at screens, and the cost to print and deliver hard copies grows faster than revenue.
Even so, there are lessons in Egbert’s approach, especially now that the industry is facing a reckoning over the true value of sharing its work on digital platforms.
Meta is making this urgent, with new commercial terms taking effect Nov. 20 that will require publishers marketing or posting on Facebook and Instagram to allow Meta’s AI systems to ingest their work. Since that change was reported Oct. 15 by Harvard’s NiemanLab, publishers around the world have responded with outrage, consternation and, for some, a hard look at the actual benefit of their presence on those platforms.
Many were already reevaluating their relationship with Google and other tech giants, after antitrust cases and copyright lawsuits (including one filed by The Seattle Times) documented how tech companies were shorting publishers and taking content to train AI systems. AI is simultaneously reducing visits to news websites and nullifying their work to draw more search traffic.
“Protecting content and intellectual property rights around content is one of the biggest questions publishers are facing right now, not only because of Meta and what they’re claiming, but because of all of the AI companies and Google scraping content, mostly without any kind of permission or compensation,” said Michael Silberman, executive vice president at Piano, an Amsterdam-based company providing digital business products to media companies.
Given how central that issue is right now for news organizations, and their legal and business teams, “I’d be very surprised if publishers didn’t at least give careful consideration whether it’s time to walk away from Meta if only as a negotiating tactic, to force Meta to either change its policy or come to the table,” he said.
Egbert’s reckoning happened a decade ago, when he realized he was losing more than he was making with a website, because it led to fewer newspaper sales.
“It didn’t take me long to realize we were basically making our own competition,” he said.
That’s not all.
“The other problem with putting our stuff online is that there’s just a group of Facebook vultures that will go steal it and put it up as their own story,” he said. “Yeah, you know they’ll either rewrite it or they’ll run it through an AI.”
A clear-eyed assessment of the value of his digital strategy isn’t the only reason Egbert’s succeeding, though.
Another is quality. The Weekly-Press is a beefy paper full of original reporting and photography. Papers I saw from August and September were 16 to 20 pages, with four or five bylined stories on the front page. They had numerous display ads, legal notices and ad inserts from regional and national retailers.
“We’re still profitable, just not very profitable. Does that make sense?” he said. “The margins are tight. You know, we’re hanging on. It’s a labor of love.”
Egbert’s especially proud of investigative stories, including articles using public records to expose racially disproportionate traffic stops and exorbitant vehicle impound charges.
The paper’s success is notable in a rural county with 20,160 residents and an average income just under $31,000, according to the U.S. Census.
It sells around 2,600 copies a week, half through subscriptions, which is impressive for a county with 7,875 households.
It offers an electronic edition but as of mid-September, only 122 subscribers chose that option. Around 1,100 people buy single copies off the rack.
“If people do not want to go online and read your paper, then you can’t make them, so you’ve got to tailor it,” said Stephanie Waller, its general manager.
“You can’t make them go to the website,” she continued. “You can’t make them, and so in our rural area, they want that hard copy of that paper, and the rack sales will show you. They’ll go buy that paper every week.”
When I visited, Egbert returned from delivering bundles with a camera around his neck. En route he photographed a car accident and while we talked, he edited the pictures, plus others he took at a youth sports event. With five employees, including a news editor, everyone pitches in.
Egbert worked for a radio station in high school and then a series of local and regional papers.
In 2009 he started The Pinckneyville Press in Pinckneyville, the Perry County seat, and later added the Du Quoin Weekly. In 2020 they merged into the Perry County Weekly-Press.
Egbert co-owns the paper with Jerry Reppert, a longtime publisher based in Anna, Ill. In 2023 Reppert sold five other papers to a chain that closed them in June.
Committed, local ownership is another reason the Weekly-Press survives in a region where so many newspapers failed.
Egbert said the paper is too small to interest larger chains and investment firms, which he’s seen bleed other papers dry.
“If you had an entity like that, they would look at us and think we don’t make enough profit that it would be worthwhile to them to keep us going,” he explained. “Somebody could come in here and they could take this business, they could cut it back to maybe one person, lose the office, live on the residual subscriptions and legals. You could sustain that for a couple of years until it just withered on the vine and died, and probably increase the profit margin, but at the expense of killing the business, and that’s what we haven’t done here.”
That happened to a competing paper in Pinckneyville owned by a series of chains until it failed. The chains had closed the office, ran it from another town and reported less and less local news.
“Then people stopped subscribing, and then the company basically had the attitude, ‘well, Pinckneyville won’t support a paper,’ ” he said. “That’s not the case at all. They will support a paper that supports them.”
Egbert believes that corporate approach is why so many local papers failed.
“You can’t run a paper in southern Illinois — in any town — from New York or Chicago or Canada or wherever these companies may be based,” he said. “You just can’t do it. It’s not feasible, and they all think they can do it, and they all buy these papers up all over the country, and it’s just not a scenario that will work.”
With or without Facebook.
