After three years of dreaming, planning, and raising start-up funds, plus a month or so of online posts, the first regular weekly edition of the Independent was published on Oct. 10, 2019. Like kids standing as tall as possible next to the door jamb for our heights to be recorded, we’ve paused to look at our progress around the newspaper’s birthday in the early fall. Last year, though, we started some new rituals, including looking at our progress the way the accountants do, on a calendar-year basis. Here is our report on 2024.
Our vision for the Independent was and still is twofold: first, we wanted to put out a publication of unusually high quality that would reflect and benefit this smart and creative community. Equally important was our plan to create a sustainable enterprise that would support good year-round jobs for journalists and all the others needed to make a newspaper come to life: designers, a sales team, and business staff.
No one had to tell us that starting a newspaper was a risky proposition — though many people did. We opened at about the same time as reports that nearly one of every four local newspapers across the country had closed, a trend that has worsened. But we studied the risks and settled on a business model we thought would work here: a combination of a traditional for-profit newspaper producing most of its revenue from advertising and paid circulation with a nonprofit mission-driven partner that would allow us to do more than ordinary small newspapers can do.
That’s the Local Journalism Project, which is committed to strengthening public awareness about the value of independent reporting and bringing young journalists here to learn the skills and principles that make local newspapers true community assets.
We are happy to say that the Indie continues to grow, thanks to readers’ loyal support. We currently have almost 5,400 subscribers, and our average weekly paid circulation — subscribers plus newsstand sales — for the year ending Oct. 1, 2024 (when the Postal Service requires newspapers to report these numbers) was 5,839, an increase of 7.5 percent over the previous year. Here’s a challenge: we need to keep growing to reach our targeted paid circulation of 7,500.
The other Outer Cape weeklies, both owned by the Gannett chain, have become “ghost papers.” Paid circulation at both the Provincetown Banner and the Cape Codder was down 36 percent from the year before — the Codder to an average of 1,196 copies and the Banner to just 547, less than a tenth of the Independent’s reach.
The business community here has strengthened our efforts. Advertising revenue grew in 2024 to $821,737 from $754,512 the previous year — an increase of almost 9 percent. Our goal had been 15 percent. Some of that growth came from new editorial projects: we published a supplement called Beach/House, focused on home, design, and gardens, in the spring and fall. Our Indie Summer Guide and Thanksgiving issue supplement, Young Voices, also helped raise ad revenue. And we’re proud, if not yet profitable, book publishers now, with two volumes in 2024, collections of essays by columnists Kai Potter and Dennis Minsky.
Many of you have donated to the Local Journalism Project, the Indie’s nonprofit partner, and those gifts have made us cautiously optimistic that our hybrid business model is working. We hoped the nonprofit would grow alongside the newspaper and it has, with donations up 32 percent in 2024, from $312,537 to $412,839. Grants from the LJP have not only supported the work of 11 early-career reporters and journalism fellows in our newsroom but this year also funded a program introducing principles of research and reporting to middle-school students in the Provincetown Schools.
In spite of this across-the-board growth, the Independent continued to operate at a loss in 2024. This is not easy to face. At our May meeting with shareholders (287 of you, thanks to a robust Direct Public Offering that brought in 260 community investors) we had reported that it looked like 2024 would be our break-even year.
We’ve been analyzing the reasons that didn’t happen. Boosted by the DPO, we kept our commitment to promoting key staff members and raising salaries. Those changes improved our operations and increased our output and quality, but revenue growth did not keep up. We also needed to make changes in the ways we’d been tracking profitability: we created a new financial modeling tool but found that it allowed some inaccuracies, which we’ve now addressed. And this one you surely know: inflation in technology, production, and postage costs affected the bottom line beyond what we built in.
We remain as determined and as cautiously optimistic as ever that this project can become part of the fabric of the Outer Cape community. While we didn’t achieve our goal of making a profit last year, we remain close to reaching stability, and we’re taking action to make this the year that the Independent turns that corner.
This means attention to some business: we are raising our advertising rates, which is only reasonable considering our increased circulation and reach. We are also raising our subscription prices by about 10 percent, which will help offset our increased costs of production and distribution. Building on the success of Beach/House and the Summer Guide, we are planning new supplements that will be meaningful to both readers and advertisers. And the Local Journalism Project is working to develop new sources of support for the nonprofit educational side of our work.
Our current financial projection for 2025 shows us turning a profit of $25,000 on total revenue of $1.95 million.
Some of the factors that will affect the Indie’s future — and the future of our Outer Cape towns — are beyond our control. For advertising revenue to continue to grow, our local business community must be strong. All of us face the challenge of recruiting and retaining skilled workers where there is an extreme shortage of housing that earners like us can afford. The Independent has been accused of bias in its reporting on housing. But the facts are undeniable: the cost of housing is a threat to the local economy and has been one factor in the newspaper’s increased expenses as we try to keep key employees on board. We welcome ideas from all of you on how to address this as an organization.
Our goal is to secure the future of the Outer Cape’s only independent news organization by building on the firm foundation that so many people in this community have laid for it. We remain grateful and believe it can be done.
