Tuesday, August 21, 2012

At rural newspapers, some publishers still resist moving online

In 1968, Dick Graham bought a small weekly newspaper in Ferry County, Wash., one of the most remote and sparsely populated counties in the Pacific Northwest.
Forty-four years later -- give or take a few months -- broadband Internet is arriving.
Graham and his century-old newspaper, The Republic News-Miner, have cast a wary eye toward the web and raised a legitimate question: Should rural newspapers go online?
Graham, now 75, has resisted.
"I'm old-fashioned," he said. "I don't put nothing up for nothing."
Long shielded from the pressure of Internet news competition, as well as classified competitors like Craigslist, rural newspapers have reportedly fared far better than their metropolitan counterparts. While newspapers in population centers saw growing competition from online startups in the past decade, rural newspapers have faced relatively little competition.
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