Why This Illinois Newspaper is Profiting by Going Offline
The Perry County Weekly-Press Profitability Model
DU QUOIN, Ill. — Jeff Egbert runs the Perry County Weekly-Press almost entirely offline and away from Facebook, a strategy that has kept the southern Illinois newspaper profitable while regional outlets face mounting closures. Operating without a website requires readers to purchase a copy or subscribe, a mechanism that simultaneously protects original reporting from being copied and republished online.
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The Tech TL;DR:
- An Illinois publisher dropped his newspaper’s website a decade ago to stop cannibalizing print rack sales and prevent online content scraping.
- Meta’s upcoming commercial terms on November 20 require publishers to let AI ingest their work, triggering industry-wide reevaluations of social media reliance.
- The Perry County Weekly-Press remains profitable with 2,600 weekly copies sold in a rural county of 20,160 residents.
Egbert stated that running a website previously killed rack sales by publishing the week’s two or three major stories for free. Abandoning the site removed that self-inflicted competition and blocked digital scrapers. “The other problem with putting our stuff online is that there’s just a group of Facebook vultures that will go steal it and put it up as their own story,” Egbert said. “Yeah, you know they’ll either rewrite it or they’ll run it through an AI.”
Meta’s November AI Ingestion Policy Sparks Industry Reckoning
The publishing industry faces an urgent reckoning over digital platforms as new commercial terms take effect November 20, requiring publishers marketing or posting on Facebook and Instagram to allow Meta’s AI systems to ingest their work. Harvard’s NiemanLab reported this change on October 15, prompting global publishers to evaluate the actual benefit of their platform presence amid ongoing antitrust cases and copyright lawsuits over content scraping.
“Protecting content and intellectual property rights around content is one of the biggest questions publishers are facing right now, not only because of Meta and what they’re claiming, but because of all of the AI companies and Google scraping content, mostly without any kind of permission or compensation,” said Michael Silberman, executive vice president at Piano, an Amsterdam-based digital business products company. Silberman noted that walking away from Meta could serve as a valuable negotiating tactic to force policy changes.
Local Print Subscription Strength in Perry County
The paper’s success persists in Perry County, where Northwestern University’s Medill School research indicates southern Illinois saw more newspaper closures than any other region in the state over recent years. Operating with five employees including a news editor, the Weekly-Press produces 16-to-20-page editions featuring four or five front-page bylined stories, display ads, legal notices, and regional retail inserts. Investigative reporting using public records has covered racially disproportionate traffic stops and exorbitant vehicle impound charges.
With an average income just under $31,000 across 7,875 households, the county supports a weekly circulation of about 2,600 copies split evenly between subscriptions and single-copy rack sales. An electronic edition introduced by mid-September attracted only 122 subscribers. General manager Stephanie Waller noted that rural readers explicitly prefer the hard copy format.
Corporate Chain Consolidation Versus Independent Ownership
Egbert co-owns the paper with longtime Anna, Illinois, publisher Jerry Reppert. In 2009, Egbert started The Pinckneyville Press in the county seat, later adding the Du Quoin Weekly before merging them into the Perry County Weekly-Press in 2020. This independent structure insulated the publication from corporate chain acquisitions that historically bled regional papers dry.
In 2023, Reppert sold five other papers to a chain that closed them by June. Egbert noted that corporate entities typically cut staff, close local offices, rely on residual subscriptions until businesses wither, and ultimately blame local support. “You can’t run a paper in southern Illinois — in any town — from New York or Chicago or Canada or wherever these companies may be based,” Egbert said.