Part 4 - Ghostbusters: The Shawnee Mission Post

The buzzy term is “ghost newspaper.” Whether the legacy paper in any given market fits that definition is a matter of debate, but it’s clear that many local papers were shadows of their former selves, even before the devastating hit of the Coronavirus. This series is dedicated to the entrepreneurs determined to reinvent the local media in their communities. 

When President Trump mistakenly placed the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs on the wrong side of the Missouri River in what seems like a lifetime ago, he either didn’t know or forgot that Kansas City is in Missouri with a metro area that includes two states.

But just across the city’s Missouri border, in Kansas, is the sprawling, fast-growing suburban area of Johnson County with 14 municipalities and a population of 595,000 - the largest county in Kansas.

The McClatchy-owned Kansas City Star has reduced coverage of Johnson County  over the years. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are picking up the slack. 

Jay Senter and his wife, Julia Westhoff, founded the Shawnee Mission Post, named after the 28,000-student Shawnee Mission School District, in 2010. In the amorphous suburbs of subdivisions and shopping centers in the county,  the school district creates much of the connective tissue. The Post serves 225,000 residents in the northeast portion of the county, just under half the population. 

Senter and Westhoff met at the University of Wisconsin, served as Peace Corps volunteers in Panama and decided to move to Jay’s hometown of Prairie Village to have their first child.

But things had changed. Johnson County no longer had its own newspaper, and residents had to rely on metro media outlets with limited coverage.

“My big thing was I got back home and was looking for information [on local schools and government], and I couldn’t find anything anywhere,” he recalled. 

“I figured, well, I’ll do this nights and weekends, just cover the city government. The idea was we’d get enough traffic that we’d be able to sell ads to the small businesses, and this would be a side hustle while I worked in the communications department at the hospital.”

Some of his early meetings were encouraging.

“I’m launching this website, and I go in to meet a city manager,” he recalled. “Well, based on my experience in Wisconsin, I knew that [could] be adversarial. But the city manager said, ‘thank you, please come in, we’ll talk. We haven’t had anyone here [from the media] in six months.’”

“They were realizing what a problem that was, that there was no written record… The administration was eager to have us come and do what journalists do.”

The decision to go digital-only wasn’t hard after initial analysis.

 “I love newspapers,” he said. “I did give it some thought. But you just run the numbers to hack out the costs of production and distribution, and so much work is unrelated to the actual production of content.”

The revenue side was more of a challenge. Senter knew little or nothing about running a successful website and fell into the trap of thinking that digital advertising would be enough. 

“Everyone thought the big idea was around the corner if you could just get the eyeballs. I really had no idea how to monetize it,” he said. 

They achieved $100,000 in annual revenue, but realized “that basically we were going to burn ourselves out without being able to pay ourselves real salaries.”

That changed when they found a mentor and co-publisher, Dan Blom, who had spent 29 years with the Howard Publications newspaper group and had a passion for local news. 

Blom was “a guy I had gone to graduate school with who was toward the end of his newspaper career,” Senter says. “That’s when we started expanding. We started to generate enough revenue to take the leap.” 

Blom now serves as “publisher emeritus” and continues to consult. 

After two years of voluntary donations, the newspaper launched a paywall in 2017. Subscriptions are $6 a month or $65 a year for full access. Annual revenue estimated at about $300,000 comes from about a 60/40 mix of subscriptions and advertising. About 40 percent of advertising dollars come from sponsored content.

“With the paywall, I think there’s more scrutiny. The readers want to feel it’s being produced with them in mind first,” he said. “And that’s 100 percent the way it should be.”

Launching the newsletters taught them another lesson; every subscriber receives a premium e-newsletter, one or two every day, five days a week. 

“I’m not sure the website is all that important,” he said. “The email newsletter is what’s important. They want to feel hooked in. My thought process has shifted from what a community newspaper did 30 or 40 years ago. The emails get the highest interaction. We have a 50 percent-plus open rate.”

Local sports coverage did not make the cut in the new, audience-based model. 

“We had a full-time sports reporter before the paywall,” he said. “When we moved to the paywall, people saw real value instead in the balls and strikes of civic affairs. We cut out game coverage and haven’t suffered. It’s just not a content bucket we’re looking to fit. After seven years, there’s no data to suggest we need to change.

“We needed to get to 1,000 to make our numbers work, and we got past that right away,” he said. They have long passed the break-even mark with more than 2,800 subscribers. 

The Post’s priority now is coverage of city governments, school districts, county government, the area’s state legislative delegation, local business and issues that impact the local economy. The company fields two full-time reporters, plus Senter  and several regular free-lance contributors, with plans to hire two more full-time staff people. Westhoff remains the key advertising and subscription executive.

The result is clear: the Post now produces five to 10 times more local content than the Star, Senter said. According to SimilarWeb.com, the Post averaged about 140,000 monthly visitors in the six months ending March 1. The Star’s website averaged 4 million, covering all of the Kansas City metro area.

“The Star has one reporter assigned to Johnson County,” he said. “Every now and then there’s more. We’re producing 25 to 30 stories a week versus their one or two. I have good, cordial relationships with them. It’s just a totally different business model. No matter what the Star does, if they’re making money it goes to California because of McClatchy’s debt.”

Local news is personal to Senter,  who still recalls his youth when the Star had robust local news coverage in the main paper and zoned editions, and the now-defunct local suburban paper, the Johnson County Sun.

With that in mind, he’s developing plans  to expand to a second site for the southern part of Johnson County, an area of around 250,000 people.

“It’s a different world below Interstate 435,” he said. “People who live there are woefully underserved.”