A weekly newspaper publisher in Northern California is selling stock to its readers, who hope to save their paper and, some of them believe, democracy. Rollie Atkinson, the owner and publisher of The Healdsburg Tribune and three other weeklies in Sonoma County, was staring down a grim financial reality. The business model, he said, was “failing rapidly.” He was tired of throwing his savings into the newspapers to keep them going, and weary of the “daily struggle” of staying afloat in an environment where readers have access to a torrent of information for free. He hired a broker to put a value on his business, thinking perhaps he could find a deep-pocketed investor. That went nowhere.
Then he found another possibility. Just to the south, in Berkeley, Calif., an online news site called Berkeleyside had taken a new approach to the crisis in local news: Sell stock to its readers. It was wildly successful. The site’s direct public offering — a more intimate version of an initial public offering in which a company sells stock without an investment bank — began in 2016 and closed this year. It raised $1 million.

So, in what is believed to be a first for a local newspaper, Atkinson undertook a similar strategy for the four newspapers that make up his Sonoma West company, which have a combined paid circulation of 9,900: The Healdsburg Tribune, The Cloverdale Reveille, The Windsor Times and Sonoma West Times & News. Since March, he has gotten a quarter of the way to his goal of $400,000. The offering lasts until March 2019, and the road show consists of Atkinson making his pitch over cocktails, at dinner parties and in everyday conversations around town.

“We’re a high-contact sport around here,” Atkinson said in a recent interview alongside Ray Holley, his managing editor. “Our readers are right here. We’re face to face. When we are in the grocery store checkout line, there are our subscribers and readers. For Ray and I, it takes a long time to get our shopping done.”