Can the Green Bay Packers inspire new model for local journalism? Newspaper leaders visited Lambeau Field to see community ownership at work
Richard Ryman
GREEN BAY – The Green Bay Packers business model might help save a newspaper, which would be appropriate since a newspaper helped save the Packers.
Leaders of The Sentinel, a weekly publication in Aurora, Colorado with twice-daily email newsletters, have been investigating whether the Packers' model, based on public ownership of the team, could provide financial viability to the news organization.
This week, Dave Perry, editor of The Sentinel, and Laura Frank, executive director of Colorado News Collaborative, attended the Packers annual shareholders' meeting at Lambeau Field so they could see up close what drove 539,062 shareholders, many from them outside of Wisconsin, to invest in the Packers.
"I was on a Zoom call with Colorado Public Radio and their head of news," Frank said. "I was saying 'I’m going out to Green Bay and we’re going to do this,' and over his shoulder he had a framed stock certificate for the Packers.”
The idea is to use community ownership and a loyal and engaged fan base to help turn the tide of an industry whose business model is struggling to support local journalism that is essential for democracy.
Joaquin Alvarado, an Oakland, California-based consultant who led formation of a holding company to operate the Aurora paper until a new ownership model is developed, believes there is a case to be made for the Packers model.
He knows how media works. He is founder of Studiotobe, a media and consulting firm, and chairman of Consumer Reports. He previously was CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting and was an executive with American Public Media and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
He's also involved in the NEW News Lab in northeast Wisconsin, which is part of a national effort by Microsoft to help rebuild capacity in local news ecosystems, restore trust in news, and reduce legal and cyber risks for journalists.
The news lab is a collaboration between the community foundations of Green Bay and the Fox Valley region and includes The Post-Crescent, the Green Bay Press-Gazette, FoxValley365, The Press Times, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Watch. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Journalism Department is an educational partner.
MORE:Read about the news lab and stories produced by its journalists
MORE: Save the Free Press: A Green Bay Packers-style approach to rescue Colorado newspaper
"I always wondered, what would it look like to go Packers on a local paper?" said Alvarado, a Packers shareholder. "How do you make a different set of economics possible?"
Seeking to stem the tide of local newspaper shutdowns
It is part of an effort to save local-news organizations, which are disappearing at an alarming rate.
Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, in its 2022 report, said the country lost more than a quarter of its 2,500 newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose one-third by 2025. More than 360 papers ended publication between late 2019 and May 2022, all but 24 of them weeklies serving communities with populations from a few hundred to tens of thousands.
Most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a digital or print replacement, the report found. The country has 6,377 surviving papers: 1,230 dailies and 5,147 weeklies.
Medill's research found that more than 20% of the nation's citizens live in news deserts, with limited access to local news. The 208 counties without a newspaper are home to 70 million people, while another 1,630 counties have one newspaper, usually a weekly, covering larger areas than they have the resources to cover local government, schools or other important community institutions.
Most communities that lose newspapers and do not have an alternative source of local news are poorer, older and lack affordable and reliable high-speed digital service that allows residents to access the important and relevant journalism being produced by the country’s surviving newspapers and digital sites. Instead, they get their local news —what little there is — mostly from the social media apps on their mobile phones, the report said.
"How do you preserve what is and what makes a community?" Alvarado asked. "You’ve got to have the community have equity in this thing. We need to engage the community so they have a seat at the table for what happens."
Packers inspire community news ownership approach
In its earliest decades, the Packers organization was closely entwined with the Green Bay Press-Gazette, which promoted the team, sold its tickets and performed most of its administrative functions.
The Packers are publicly owned, but their stock is not traded. The team has had only six stock sales in its 103-year history. The stock does not pay dividends, so all revenue stays with the organization. Shareholders vote on a board of directors and other matters that might come up, but much of the organization's decisions are made by the president/CEO and executive committee.
This works for the Packers because football is hugely popular, and lucrative, and the Packers are the NFL's most successful franchise, with the best story. The team has a loyal and driven fanbase.
One of the challenges the Sentinel owners will have, should they choose the Packers' method, is to convince citizens of Aurora that the news they get is worth paying for with more than subscriptions alone.
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Aurora may ring a bell. Ten years ago this month, Aurora was the site of a mass shooting in a movie theater than left 12 people dead and 70 more injured, 58 of them by gunfire.
The father of one of the victims, Tom Sullivan, a mail carrier who was spurred to run for state legislature to try to help prevent such incidents, has explained the importance of local news being there day after day to cover the event and its aftermath.
"That type of sustained coverage helped him and the community move forward, to understand this is what really happened here and how we can prevent it in other places, but also how to internalize that kind of massive disaster and keep going," Perry said.
Frank believes the Sentinel has the seeds of the kind of public following the Packers enjoy.
"Right now, the Sentinel receives more money from donations from the community than even subscriptions from the community," Frank said. "... which I think is a fantastic piece of evidence about how much the community supports this. Which is why we think a Packers-type model will work."
Colorado: A laboratory for news industry innovation
Colorado is something of a innovation lab for reporting. The Colorado News Conservancy and the Colorado News Cooperative (CoLab) work to keep local news alive and thriving.
The conservancy is a collaboration of the National Trust for Local News and The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned public-benefit publication. The first-of-its-kind local and national partnership, the conservancy bought a family-owned chain of 24 newspapers in Colorado, but because it is new and still finding its own way, the conservancy was not ready to take on the Sentinel.
"CoLab had been working with Dave and his staff at the Sentinel trying to understand deeply how we could help them evolve," Frank said. "That’s when the (Sentinel) owner said, 'I’ve got these other things I need to focus on. I want to donate the newspaper to CoLab.'"
CoLab was not in position to take over ownership of the Aurora paper, so Alvarado led the establishment of a holding company to buy time to figure out what to do with the Sentinel.
That question led to this week's trip to Green Bay.
Perry was especially eager to learn to what degree public ownership informs the team's decisions; how well do team leaders listen to shareholders?
"We’ll have a board of directors, likely, who will have no input on how we direct the editorial department. That has to be independent," Perry said. "On the other hand, as reporters and editors, we are desperate to be less insular, especially after two years of pandemic, to find out, are you reading this? Do you like it? What are we missing? How much more should we give toward just features and events, and things like that?"
Frank said it's apparent the Packers behave differently than other professional sports teams because of the public ownership, which is an important element for possible public ownership of the newspaper.
It is still too early to tell if a Packers model will work, but in any case, Frank believes a combination of funding sources, including grants, subscriptions and partnerships might be needed.
"It isn’t so much the newspaper itself, but the purpose we serve," Perry said. "There is a dire need for straight information, for people who have time and resources to ask questions that no one else does, and tell people things that are so important in their lives, that they have no other way of finding that out."
Contact Richard Ryman at (920) 431-8342 or rryman@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @RichRymanPG, on Instagram at @rrymanPG or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/RichardRymanPG.