David Stoeffler and Tom Carlson

[00:01] TOM CARLSON: I think I was going to do that. Good morning. This is Tom Carlson. I'm 69 years old. I'm here with my colleague David Stoeffler to talk about our experiences in starting a nonprofit newspaper in partnership with Missouri State University here in Springfield, Missouri.

[00:25] DAVID STOEFFLER: I'm David Stoeffler I'm 63. And today is Friday, April 29, 2022. We're in Springfield, Missouri, at the library center. And I'm here with my friend and partner, Tom Carlson, who is spearheading the effort to start up the Springfield Daily citizen here in Springfield. And so that's actually, I'm going to start by asking, Tom, you know, why the heck you're doing this? I mean, you've had a long and successful business career, a long history of public service in Springfield. You're the longest serving mayor in Springfield history. You certainly could have done lots of things at this stage of your life other than try to start up a nonprofit news organization. So why?

[01:23] TOM CARLSON: Well, occasionally I ask myself that same question. David, I've had a long relationship with the news media. In fact, I got a degree in journalism in 1975 from George Washington University. And Chinese, of all things, spent a little time in the Far east my wife and I did in hopes of becoming a foreign correspondent, and that didn't work out. I came back to Springfield, where I worked for the news and leader one year, and then I edited a weekly paper for a year. And from there I went into law school. And then not too long after I got out of law school, I ran for city council. So probably for 40 years now, 45, if you consider the work I did as a newspaper reporter and so forth, I've been interested in the community and in the government and how those two interplay. And when I worked on the news leader in 1975 and 76, my guess that there were 100 people in the newsroom producing content, and now that same publication probably has something in the neighborhood of 15 people. I'm not suggesting they've done anything wrong. I don't misunderstand, but it's just the way the newspaper business has changed over the years. When I was mayor here for 14 years, there was a relationship. We were between the newspaper that people call the fourth estate sometimes and local government. And it was sort of a natural adversarial relationship to some extent. The paper's job was to make sure that the goings on in local government was being accurately reported. And on the flip side, we really couldn't get our message out to the community and tell the people what's going on and try to get their support for big initiatives. And that vehicle, David, is no longer really there anymore. People get their news from different sources, and so often it seems like we're in echo chambers. A friend of mine is United States Senator Roy Blunt, and I was fortunate enough to have dinner with him a few weeks ago. He's retiring, and I had an opportunity to ask him why he thinks that we've become so politically divided in recent years. And the reason that he gave was, he says, because people get their news from different sources. In the old days, there were the tv stations, the networks, and the local papers. So it reminded me of a saying attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former us senator from New York, that you're certainly entitled to your own opinion, but not your own set of facts. And I saw that was something that I thought needed to be addressed in the community. Thats why I reached out to you as a former managing editor for the news leader and formed a committee with people that are longtime residents of the city and have had a lot of experience in the news business to develop the Springfield Daily Citizen. I might ask you, David, a little bit about how the news business has changed over the year and what tempted you to accept this job in starting basically a startup?

[06:17] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah. You know, you put your finger on something that's both really important to me, but it's also really a critical part of the problem for the news media, and that's the fragmentation. And, you know, that's throughout my career. I mean, I started in the newspaper business. Well, even when I was in high school, about the same time you were starting at the news and leader here. And, you know, everybody got the same newspaper. Everybody watched one of the three tv stations. I mean, heck, I remember when Fox, the Fox network was created and the Simpsons came on and just like, what do you mean there's gonna be a fourth network? I mean, it's just. But now everybody, as you talked about, Senator Blunt saying, everybody gets their news from different sources, and they're so easily satisfied by just a glimpse of the news. You know, we see it even with what we are trying to do, that so many people are just reading the headline, they're just reading the one or two sentence summary of a story without actually reading the story. And oftentimes, these are people who are really well educated, smart, engaged people, and yet they're still not tempted to dig into and learn the details. And it feels different than it did 40 years ago when I first started in the news business.

[07:56] TOM CARLSON: Well, David, I think maybe our listeners would be interested in what's happened in the traditional newspaper industry over the last 20 or 30 years?

[08:06] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah, it's been a big change. And, you know, the number of journalists is dramatically down. Even just in the last 15 years, there's been something like 35,000 journalists who have lost their jobs. And it's because of the change in the business model. You know, when I was first in the business, we, newspapers, very profitable business, very high margins for those who are in the business world, margins in the 30% to 40% range were common, and most business people would be happy with five or 6%. That's right, margins. So newspapers traditionally very profitable, and a lot of that profit came from things like classified advertising from the other, what we call display advertising. Car dealers, for instance, real estate agents were huge, huge users of the newspapers. And the department stores would have multiple pages. Macy's or Dillard's would not just run a full page ad, they'd run three or four full page ads in a single edition. And so all of that revenue, again, at the beginning of my career, especially when I started moving into management, the advertising people, they would just say, well, how much do we want to raise our rates this year? Is 5% enough, or should we go with 7%?

[09:42] TOM CARLSON: So they didn't have much in the way of alternatives?

[09:45] DAVID STOEFFLER: No, no, the consumers and the businesses didn't have alternatives. Well, then along came Craigslist and took a lot of the classified advertising away. And then, I mean, who really starts today buying a car by looking at the ads in the newspaper? Maybe. Maybe you might look at the ads in the paper to get an idea of some of the pictures and some things like that. But people are going online to do their research for cars, for homes. I always tell people there was a time when, if you wanted to know what movies were showing, you had to get the newspaper, because there wasn't another way to learn what movies were, what the movie times were, or even what the movies were about. You had to buy the newspaper. And so, so much of that is gone away. And that's, of course, affected the business of the news so well.

[10:46] TOM CARLSON: David, how have the newspapers coped with these gigantic declines in the revenue?

[10:52] DAVID STOEFFLER: The only way any business would deal with them, which is you have to cut your expenses to match the revenues. And I always tell people, I do a lot of consulting in the news business over the years, and I tell people, if you, in your home budget, if you took a pay cut this year, the first year, you might say, well, we just won't have take that trip to Europe, we were planning, or we'll put off buying a new car, and if it's temporary, the economy's bad, and I had to take a little pay cut, and it's like, well, we.

[11:28] TOM CARLSON: Just take a notch out of your belt.

[11:30] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah, we just don't do some of the luxury things. But when it's permanent, when your pay is reduced by 10%, 20%, 30%, what are your choices? You have to downsize your house. You have to eliminate some of your expenses. And it's the same for a business like the newspaper business. They've had dramatic, dramatic declines in the revenue. And even though they have tried to maintain their profit margins, they've had to take a bite out of those. But the only way to reduce is reduce people in the end, or reduce, like for the print editions of the newspapers, you know, reducing the number of days that they're publishing. So all of that's had a big effect on the local journalism. And that's to get back to your initial question, you know, why I'm here. It's a chance to try to get back to some of those core values that I know you and I share, and that I think a lot of people in the community share, which is they do care about local issues, and they do want to have a fair and honest and accurate reporting of those governmental agencies and of other important issues. And that's something that I valued during my entire journalism career. And so when I had a chance to get back into journalism, I'd been out for seven years. That was a strong motivating factor for me.

[13:05] TOM CARLSON: You know, when I was mayor, I was on the city council and local government for around 25 years. And people would occasionally say to me, why in the world would you want to take up a job like that for no pay and just have people mad at you a lot of the time. And what I would say is because from time to time, you get to work with people whose primary interest is just improving the community in which they live. And that's as good as it gets when you were working with folks like that. And I think that that was probably. Well, I'm not much of a golfer and not much of a fisherman or not much of anything in many areas, but I thought I had enough exposure in these different areas that maybe I had a little. There was maybe a little tire left, a tread left on the tire that I might be able to contribute, I would just say. Or maybe I think our listeners would be interested in knowing, David, about kind of what you expected in terms of starting this nonprofit. And what your impression is now, ten weeks after launch?

[14:39] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah, I think what's motivated me in many ways in my journalism career is some of the same things you just talked about, really, about trying to make a difference in the community. And I think that that was a key factor in what we are trying to do with the Springfield Daily Citizen, is our mission is to inform the community and be a catalyst for good in the community.

[15:08] TOM CARLSON: That's our motto, isn't it? Our mission statement. Right. A force for good.

[15:12] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah, force for good.

[15:13] TOM CARLSON: Right.

[15:13] DAVID STOEFFLER: And, you know, it's, it was a key part of, as we put together our ideas, obviously, you had to have an idea of how much money did you think all this might take and what kind of money did we think we could have available. And so our plan allowed us to start with a staff of eleven people, which is a significant investment compared to a lot of other nonprofit news organizations. It's quite large compared to a lot of others. But, you know, our hope was that we could balance the need for more depth reporting, deeper look at issues in the community. And part of that was to help make sure that the community was informed not just about the issue, but also how they could get engaged.

[16:03] TOM CARLSON: That's one aspect that I've really liked about the daily citizen. It's, in my experience, unusual. You read an article and it's sort of like you're the little red hen saying the sky's falling and you don't feel better after reading it. You feel maybe from time to time, a little depressed. But I really like the way that in so many of the stories that the citizen, you've suggested ways for people to get involved, and if it floats their boat, a way for them to make a difference.

[16:41] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah. That's a key thing that we are trying to accomplish, is helping people understand why they should care about an issue. And if they agree that that's a good reason for them to care, then what can I do about it? Is it just, I could volunteer, I could make a donation to some nonprofit organization that's working on it. I could call them, I could call the mayor. Those sorts of things has been a key part of what we're trying to do. And at the same time, we're also trying to balance that. People's lives are busy and they want to learn about opportunities of things to do. Arts and culture, our area is a huge area for outdoors and recreation, so we're putting a lot of emphasis on that kind of content. And we've gotten really strong positive feedback on that. But the most read stories have all been serious stories, foster care and all the efforts to try to reunite families when kids are separated from their parents. Stories about the loss of teachers in the local schools and why they're leaving is not really because of salary, although, of course, that's a factor. It's more about their view of public education and how the community views public education and the feedback from parents and undisciplined students and all the pressure that teachers are feeling. And those are the kinds of stories that are getting really well read in the daily citizens. So that part of it has gone well, and we feel really gratified about at just ten weeks.

[18:22] TOM CARLSON: But you can't cover everything. You've got to make choices. What types of coverage are you foregoing in order to have this in depth sort of coverage?

[18:34] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah, so we're not chasing ambulances. One of the things we decided from the beginning is we're not trying to duplicate the work of all the other media. Local television stations, in particular, do a really excellent job of covering police and crime issues. And so we want to look at more crime from more of an in depth perspective and more of a trend or issue perspective, but not chase after every arrest that's going on. So that's one of the key things that we've given up. We're not doing a lot of sports coverage. We do some sort of bigger columns and things like that on local sports. And again, the television stations and the news leader do a fine job of covering high school sports, and we're not trying to do that. So, you know, we have to make choices, as you say.

[19:33] TOM CARLSON: Well, our listeners wouldn't know without us saying so, but we were housed at the, on the campus of Missouri State University. And I know you were a big advocate of forming a, initiating this effort in collaboration with the university. Why did you think that was important to do?

[19:59] DAVID STOEFFLER: Well, a couple of different reasons. One is short term and one is longer term. The short term Missouri state is a major player in Springfield, and they are.

[20:13] TOM CARLSON: It'S like a small city. It's got 25,000 students, and they have.

[20:18] DAVID STOEFFLER: Really the leadership, particularly the current president, Cliff Smart. The board of governors has been very active in wanting Springfield to be a great place because they see that as smart for their long term survival and growth, too. And so they've been very engaged in helping Springfield be a better place. And they have a specific mission of providing public affairs support throughout the community and throughout the state, for that matter. And so since our focus is on public affairs, it made sense to try to partner with them. The long term benefit is the relationship with students and faculty to try to be able to develop future journalists. Regardless of the trend in the profession, I believe there's always going to be a need for journalists and people who will take the time to learn and decipher issues and figure out ways to communicate that, whether it's through a newspaper or through a digital format or through podcasting or videos or through some other communication, means yet to be. Yet to be invented. But there's always going to be a need for people who will look into stories and figure out how to tell that story to the community.

[21:48] TOM CARLSON: I certainly agree with you. Obviously, you know, I've been around a long time now, and there's a large number of people in Springfield that are philanthropically inclined, and frequently, in many instances, with the business sector particularly, they see that it's in their interest to promote their community, to try to create a city where people want to live. And, you know, I know it's my hope that if we could fast forward 50 years from now, this nonprofit newspaper that doesn't have to make a return for its investors will have more and more buy in. And so it's considered the community's newspaper, not unlike I, Green Bay, Wisconsin, considers the packers their team.

[22:58] DAVID STOEFFLER: Correct.

[22:58] TOM CARLSON: And that's the test, of course, is that we have buy in and that we have credibility. And maybe you could speak to that.

[23:10] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah. And I think, you know, part of my efforts as an editor, like, for instance, when I was the editor at the Springfield news leader, to be honest, the newspaper's relationship with the community had deteriorated substantially before I came to town. And it was clear to me that it was antagonistic. And so I always feel like it's a lot easier to take advice from a friend than it is from somebody who you view as an enemy. So my goal was to try to develop the newspaper more as a friend. And I called it a candid friend.

[23:53] TOM CARLSON: I like that analogy.

[23:54] DAVID STOEFFLER: You know, someone who would tell you honestly, hey, maybe you ought to go take a look in the mirror this morning, or you got some dill in your teeth from those sandwiches this morning. You know, I think you're on the right track, that what we need to do is develop trust with people. And, you know, trust is earned. It's not just granted. So how do we do that? We need to be accessible. We need people to see us as human beings, as people who are invested in the community. So, you know, as you know, one of the priorities we put was on hiring people who had a reason to be in Springfield, Missouri, people who were already here or people who had been here, like myself, and who cared about the community and who had an investment, if you will, as opposed to just, I'm passing through on my way to the next spot and people pick up on that. I know from experience people automatically, they know, oh, so you bought a house. That's great. That sounds like that tells you something.

[25:12] TOM CARLSON: About your level of commitment.

[25:13] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah. As opposed to, oh, you're, you're not.

[25:17] TOM CARLSON: Living month to month lease.

[25:20] DAVID STOEFFLER: Exactly. So, you know, I think that building that trust is really important, but it's all about, can we develop a feeling of joint ownership where the community really does feel like this is their news organization, not just it is an outsider who's going to prick us every chance they get.

[25:44] TOM CARLSON: Well, you know, traditional newspapers would take a position either in support or opposition to political candidates. What's the Daily Citizen's role going to be in that regard?

[26:00] DAVID STOEFFLER: We're not endorsing candidates. First of all, as a nonprofit organization, we really need to stay out of politics. You could take positions on issues and encourage people to take action, but we're choosing to let the community be the voice of that. So, I mean, we accept, we have columnists, and we do accept letters to the editor and guest columns where people can express which candidates they want to support or views. But we as an organization, aren't going to be endorsing candidates or writing editorials blasting local officials for this, that or the other thing.

[26:45] TOM CARLSON: So as it relates to those letters to the editor that you will be receiving are, as long as they abstain from profanity, that sort of thing, can they say anything they want or how are you going to police that?

[27:04] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah, we are trying to not be the wild west in our voices section. We think that kind of the people at the extremes in our society have unfortunately kind of drowned out the vast majority of people that we see as being more in the middle ground and being more reasonable and not name calling. We don't want name calling. We want to keep to a minimum people who are questioning the motives of other people. You have to support your argument with facts. You can't just say, well, I saw this on Rachel Maddow show, or I saw this on Tucker Carlson's show. And so it must be true, our.

[27:53] TOM CARLSON: Relationship, by the way, as far as I know.

[27:58] DAVID STOEFFLER: So, you know, we want people to make their arguments with facts and supported by facts, as you alluded earlier, you know, that there should only be one set of actual facts and, but at the same time, if you. We want to entertain people who have wildly different points of view in terms of their politics, their religions, you know, the social causes that they think are important, but find a way to do it in a civil fashion where it entertains and welcomes feedback. And I. And people with a different point of view, as opposed to, you're an idiot if you believe anything other than what I believe. Cause if somebody calls you an idiot, it either means now you're just gonna argue with them or you're gonna walk away. And that's not gonna engage people in finding a solution.

[28:59] TOM CARLSON: Well, a separate question, perhaps. I talked to a lot of people about the daily Citizen. They say, well, how do I. When can I get it delivered to my house? What's your business model about that? I know home delivery for most newspapers is fast becoming a thing of the past.

[29:23] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah, we deliver it to your house 24 hours a day. Anytime you want to pick up your phone or your computer or your tablet, you can get our news. But no, we're not looking at printing a publication. And it is hard for many of us of an older generation to adapt to not walking out to the driveway and picking up that newspaper in the morning. But as you know, and this is part of what we talked about earlier, the economics of the business. It's extremely expensive, and it always has been extremely expensive to print a product, to then organize the delivery of that product. As we used to joke, we were the only product that depended on twelve year olds riding bicycles to deliver. But that was a cost model that was affordable. But we know that to read, to recreate that printing and distribution system would be really expensive, and we would rather invest our money in the reporters and in the freelance contributors to the.

[30:43] TOM CARLSON: Well, and the other problem, of course, is that they, because the printing presses are no longer located in the community, they have to get printed 100, 200 miles away. So you have a very early deadline, and you're not going to read last night's sports scores from the Glendale Parkview game.

[31:08] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the local paper is printed in Columbia, missouri. It's obviously more than 2 hours to drive it here. Their deadline is late afternoon. The previous day. Some of my. The papers in my home state of Wisconsin, their paper in Green Bay, you mentioned, is going to be published, going to be printed in Peoria, Illinois.

[31:31] TOM CARLSON: My goodness.

[31:31] DAVID STOEFFLER: Which is maybe 5 hours, 6 hours away, because that's where the efficiency is in the system to try to reduce the cost. But what it really signals is we're not going to print as many papers, and we're not going to print every day in the future.

[31:50] TOM CARLSON: How do people who are interested in what you're undertaking here access the Daily Citizen?

[31:59] DAVID STOEFFLER: Yeah, so it's easy to go to our website, sgfcitizen.org. that gives you all the info you need to be able to see our content and find out more about how to contact or interact with us. I would kind of come back around to asking you when you think about this and what your experience has been now for the last year or so, helping kind of put this whole thing together. I mean, where do you really see it going? What's the future of news in a local community like Springfield?

[32:39] TOM CARLSON: Well, I think there's a saying in the stock market world, cut your losses short and let your profits run. And we're making up some of this as we go along. So I think we're going to have to be open to different ideas and different approaches. The old saying is if you do the same thing you've been doing, you're going to get the same results you've been getting. And so we have to be creative and open. But I think the thing that I'm hoping the daily citizen brings to the table is a level of trust within the community. I think if we can be considered what papers used to be a journal of record, and I frankly don't have a good idea how quickly this can all ramp up. But our business model is a better one because we can accept all the revenue. We can accept revenue from all the sources that a traditional paper can. But we've got two big advantages. First, we don't have to earn a return for investors. Secondly, we can accept charitable, philanthropic contributions. And this town, I think I'm qualified to say this is a town that will always give you a shot. They're going to watch you closely, but if you do what you said you're going to do, they're going to give you more support. I think that's the challenge, to reach out to people and to give them things you want. Our main mission is to deal with community issues that really affect the next generation, and so we can't lose sight of that. But as we get more and more readership and sponsorships and open to different ways of doing things, maybe we can have a column on recipes, more high school sports, and all those sort of things that are really necessary. Because if we don't have a sort of like a commonplace for folks to come and to exchange their ideas and their thoughts and to be informed, I think it's going to really retard the growth of the community and the sense of well being that you want a community to have if you're going to live here.

[35:40] DAVID STOEFFLER: And I think you're dead on with that, because not every person on the street is invested in the community. Not everybody does necessarily care about the future they're focused on today, and some of them have very good reasons to be focused on today where they're, you know, not they're struggling financially, they're struggling mentally, whatever the case might be. But I think that there is a true hunger in the community, and I can say for sure in Springfield, Missouri, there is a true hunger for being able to work together to make the community a better place to live, to improve the quality of life, including for those people who aren't engaged. And so I think the feedback we have gotten on the daily citizen has been very much in tune with that, and it reflects back on the choice of our name. We view ourselves as, as citizens, and that brings with it responsibilities and also brings with it rights. But we're very much invested in making this a better place. And, you know, I'm glad to be here with you to be able to try to make that happen.

[37:03] TOM CARLSON: Well, I would just say, in closing, I can personally attest to my observations of how hard you worked and how hard your whole staff has worked to get the Daily citizen launched. And the feedback we're getting is really good. And the last thing I would just like to say is I like to pick winners. And what we're doing is not something that is just created out of whole cloth. There are other examples now across the country that are following a similar template. And I think that the news business and the critical, you know, Thomas Jefferson said if he had to choose between government and newspapers, he would pick newspapers because there has to be a way to keep the people informed about what's going on. And I think if we can stick, stay true to that mission, I won't be around. But some, I think it'll be good for our community over the long term.