Center Square Journal to Present Survival Plan This Week

The owner of a failing local news website will decide on the paper's future by Saturday.

Mike Fourcher, who began the Center Square Journal and its sister paper, the Roscoe View Journal, announced in January he could no longer financially support the two websites.

As an alternative to shutting down, Fourcher held a community meeting Jan. 31 at the DANK Haus. He put it to the community to decide the paper’s fate.

While neither Fourcher nor attendees had an exact idea on how to keep the sites alive, two definites came out of the meeting: the CSJ and RVJ websites will merge into one, and no one at the meeting wanted the outlets to go defunct.

Ideas included turning the CSJ into a nonprofit, using micro-donation funding like a Kickstarter page, or becoming a social cause business.

Saturday, Fourcher sent out an update to subscribers, previewing details of the website’s future.

“I have scheduled a set of meetings with people with particular interest in moving CSJ forward. We will be discussing some specific plans for a new, reinvigorated CSJ,” he stated in the email.

At the 55-person forum, five people volunteered services ranging from meeting with chambers, contributing free content and marketing.

Between the cost of two part-time editors, servers and site operations, Fourcher says it costs roughly $56,000 annually to run CSJ and its sister publication. However, in 2012, the editor said the news websites made just $58,000 in advertising revenue.

Read previous: