Alumni Gazette

Recent years have not been easy ones in the newspaper business, but for journalist Louis Hansen ’89 those challenges simply underscore the need to find ways to keep regional papers profitable and engaging—because they are critical to their communities, he says.

That’s why he’ll spend this academic year at Stanford, as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow, developing a model for regional papers to produce afternoon tablet publications with exclusive content.

“The irony of online news and online publications is that more people are consuming the work that daily newspapers do, but newspapers are making less money,” Hansen says. That’s because advertising, more than subscriptions, is where newspapers have found their profits, and as advertising has migrated online, it has brought less revenue than print advertisements once did.

Last August Hansen’s paper, The Virginian Pilot, launched an iPad equivalent of an evening paper, for which Hansen is an enterprise and investigative reporter. While most papers have tablet apps, they’re really a recreation of their website. What the Norfolk, Virginia, paper was doing was unique at the time of the launch: “We were delivering stories you wouldn’t find anywhere else in our publication,” says Hansen.

And the stories found in regional papers are news covered nowhere else, he says. When it comes to city councils, local government, and other regional institutions, newspapers are still the source for investigative journalism and other long-form, quality writing.

Through his Knight fellowship, Hansen—who was once sports editor at the Campus Times and earned a master’s degree in journalism from NYU—is hoping to develop a model for other newspapers to follow. He’ll take classes at Stanford in business, design, and other departments to find ways to make tablet publications work better. His goal is to help newspapers publish profitably on tablets and to produce quality journalism that appeals to readers, serves the community, and supports the newspaper.

“I hope it’s something practical,” he says, “something that really can help improve what newspapers do.”

—Kathleen McGarvey