By Candy J. Cooper
Four Ethiopian families live among the prairies, mountain peaks, and rodeos of Greeley, Colorado, and no newspaper reader survey anywhere has turned up interest in one Ethiopian man’s end-of-life journey home.
The Greeley Tribune wrote that story anyway — in seven novelistic parts.
Tribune reporter Millete Birhanemaskel, who told the first-person account of her ailing father’s return to his Ethiopian homeland, cannot swim at the town pool now without a curious reader asking after her brother or dad.
The length and apparent riskiness of the “Going Home” story is more norm than exception at the 25,000-circulation daily, which has so far ignored the reflexive, quick-hit, grab-the-young formula that is handed down by typical newspaper consultants. The Tribune relies instead on its gut.
Instinct has led, in recent years, to a fourteen-month series on children in poverty; a twenty-month series on Latino-Anglo relations; a seven-part series on living with disabilities; and an eight-month-long series on the widening gap between rich and poor in the Tribune’s own Weld County. In an area founded on beet sugar, spuds, and cattle, some parts have recently exploded into upscale suburbs. Greeley was recently named the fastest-growing metro area in the country by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The Tribune’s megastories may seem ruinous in an industry already in circulation freefall. But the newspaper’s approach offers evidence to the contrary: that stories of marathon length on social issues can sell newspapers. Whether poor children or an immigrant father would attract readers in other growing cities is a matter of speculation, but the Tribune is one of the only dailies in Colorado whose circulation has slowly, steadily climbed over a decade. In the midst of a population boom in that state — 30 percent over the past fifteen years — papers in Denver and Fort Collins have been losing readers instead of gaining them in recent years.
So whose instinct sells the Tribune? If it is editor Chris Cobler’s, it’s not because he’s a throwback. He can talk reader experience, target audience, and redesign prototype with the best of today’s newspaper improvement gurus. To more deliberately engage young adults, Cobler writes his own editor’s blog, “Virtual Greality.” He’s created an online advisory panel of 850 readers. He’s overseen risky new ventures, including a Spanish-language weekly edition, La Tribuna, begun in January and already profitable, surpassing company projections by 50 percent, Cobler said.
What further distinguishes the Tribune’s coverage , which is capturing national awards, may be Cobler’s humanistic take on “the reader.” As newspapers troll for new subscribers, that “reader” has come to look like a young, shallow, multitasking, gadget-loving nonreader. The only way to capture him is via a lively mix of salacious, celebrity, conflict-ridden, short, and useful stories presented with the graphic allure of a children’s cereal box — preferably online.
That’s fine for starters, Cobler believes. But his reader takes a slightly different shape. His reader is a neighbor, not a sensation-seeker.
“You welcome him into the neighborhood with a plate of chocolate chip cookies,” explained Cobler, who is thinking metaphorically these days as a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard University, where he is studying how community newspapers can use the Web to lure young readers. “You feed him with whatever is trendy, sexy, and eye-catching,” he continued, “but then you have him for dinner for a full meal. So that even if he doesn’t know he wants more, you hope you can help him want more.”
Who knows this reader best? Not a marketing consultant with a headset and clipboard, but Tribune reporters, editors, and even copy editors. Under Cobler, the entire forty-person newsroom joins in a half-day retreat each year to discuss and vote on the best of a set of major story ideas from reporters. Thus the newspaper’s agenda is created.
Ethiopia was different, conceived after the twenty-three-year-old Birhanemaskel asked for a leave to take her father home. Cobler saw a story, and reporter and editor began to talk about themes: father-daughter love, reclaiming lost dignity, the immigrant experience in America, going home. The consumer-reader might not have cared. Cobler wagered that Tribune readers did.
Not all of them did.
“What are you thinking?” wrote “anonymous” in an online comment after the first installment. “ Ethiopia and Greeley have in common just one thing: they are probably on the same planet.”
With each new installment, the world got smaller, as reader comments traveled from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and every continent on earth to the inboxes of the small-town daily. The Ethiopian community had weighed in. But what about, say, local Rotarians, whom reporter Birhanemaskel addressed after her stories appeared. She says she looked up from her notes to see some people in her audience weeping.
That came as a shock until she had a Cobler-like thought: “Who can’t relate to the love between a father and daughter,” she said.
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