Baptist newspaper closes & death stalks the rest

Which Baptist state newspaper will follow the Utah-Idaho Southern Baptist Witness into oblivion?

The Utah/Idaho Southern Baptist Convention announced in February that the tabloid-sized paper would end publication. There was mention of looking "at alternative ways to communicate the stories of our churches and associations and state convention," but as of this writing the Utah-Idaho Southern Baptist Witness has not been replaced with a Web news or other service.

It published 10 issues a year for perhaps 1,300 subscribers: not a viable market. The announcement said, "There have been numerous approaches to try to increase the number of subscriptions and make it cost-effective over the years."

All of those efforts failed, as have the circulation-building efforts of Baptist state publications as a group. The arc of Baptist state association newspaper publication circulation decline is inexorable.

Falling revenue has, as with other recession-plagued religious organizations -- whether ministries, seminaries or nondenominational enterprises -- forced staff and other cutbacks on the ecclesiastical press.

Lacking the heavy marketplace pressure which has driven mainstream publications, the ecclesiastical press has on the whole adapted even less well to the rise of the Web than its for-profit kinfolk. The Christian Science Monitor's shift from print to a Web-based strategy, with a high-quality Web product to support it, is the shining exception.

Among the less well-known, some which were once technological leaders have reversed field to give up, for example, an early adopter advantage in social-networking distribution via twitter. Similarly, the Texas Baptist Standard recently announced an online subscription strategy -- paid access to a visual analog of the print newspaper, with online bells and whistles. Yet online experiments with paid subscriptions have produced no general information winners.

Baptist state convention newspapers in general may have a very limited future. The big Texas Baptist Standard, for example, persuades the average visitor to spend barely enough time on the site (just over a minute and half per visitor) to peruse the index page or perhaps read part of an online story. Repackaging or more heavily promoting content whose Web traffic already demonstrates little marketplace appeal may not be a path to survival, no matter what kind of digital presentation is used.