Two weeks ago in this column, I wrote about a group of kids on Long Island who have started a newspaper called The Ditch Weekly, which was described by its 17-year-old chief financial officer as “very profitable.” The story, in the New York Times, was a quirky but welcome bit of positive reporting about the newspaper business, which remains chronically troubled.
At the Independent’s annual shareholders meeting on Sunday we went over our financial numbers so that our investors — there are nearly 300 of you — could see how we’re faring in our mission to serve the community’s need for high-quality journalism, create decent-paying year-round jobs for our staff, and produce a modest and sustainable profit.
We feel good about the first two parts of that equation — but we had hoped that our fifth year would be the one in which we turned a profit, and we did not hit that mark. Though circulation and advertising revenues both continued to grow in 2024, so did expenses, and we finished the year with an operating loss.
We’re almost halfway through 2025 now, and we’re currently projecting a modest profit this year.
One of the best things about our annual meeting is that it gives us a chance to revisit our mission and talk to our investors about how we make editorial and business decisions and what we could do differently. When we started the Indie in 2019, the newspapers that had covered the Outer Cape for decades were withering: losing readers, laying off staff, and failing in their fundamental job of strengthening the community through good reporting. We thought apathy was one of the biggest risks we faced — that people would decide that newspapers simply weren’t needed.
On that front, much has changed. Every day we see clear evidence that people care about the Independent — they subscribe, place ads, write letters, send pictures, and donate to the Local Journalism Project that brings young reporters into our newsroom.
When we began this paper, we thought of those young reporters as a nice extra in our plan. That, too, has changed. Running a newspaper here, we now know, means developing high-level journalistic skills in young people, because as more newspapers have failed, the number of working journalists has tanked. We can’t count on recruiting experienced reporters and editors to come work here. Hardly anyone is left in the industry, and those who are can’t afford to move to the Outer Cape.
There’s another terrifying development that we hadn’t imagined: the proliferation of disinformation and lies is no longer confined to slanted news channels and internet trolls. The government itself is obliterating historical and scientific truths, broadcasting slander about immigrants and their defenders, and disappearing people from our communities with no record of who they are or where they’ve been taken.
Our mission in launching this newspaper hasn’t changed, but we have a newly urgent reason for it: to nurture in a new generation of reporters the skills of fact-finding, asking tough questions, verifying truth, and exposing deception.
