Amish media: 'The Budget has been using new media ideas for more than a century'

In July Cardiff University journalism graduate Jessica Best took a placement with Amish newspaper The Budget, based in Sugarcreek, Ohio.

Best won funding for the trip with a travel journalism scholarship from the Welsh Livery Guild by pitching to study the Amish media scene. Below she reports back for Journalism.co.uk on her time with the paper - the challenge of moving online and how its relationship with its distinct audience.

I had no idea what to expect on a two-week placement with Amish newspaper The Budget. My first morning was a Sunday, so the Budget office was closed, but it gave me a taste of things to come; sitting on the veranda of my hotel, blogging about my journey, I heard the sound of horses' hooves. 

I looked up, and an Amish buggy (horse and cart) rolled past my motel, complete with Amish family dressed in their Sunday best. This clash between old versus new, the modern world versus a bygone age, characterised the two weeks I spent in Sugarcreek, Ohio.

There were so many interesting elements to my trip - in particular, the fact that The Budget has not experienced the same slump in advertising revenues as other newspapers in the US, because the paper is still the most effective way to reach Amish businesses' customers; and the difficulties The Budget has in maintaining its youth readership, because it is so steeped in tradition.

The paper
The 120-year-old Budget, which has a circulation of just above 16,000, comes in two parts. The front 10 pages form the local edition - a regional weekly for Sugarcreek and the surrounding area.

While the local does include some Amish news, because this community makes up a substantial part of the local population, its focus is primarily on 'English' or non-Amish news.

As the paper caters for both communities, chief reporter Bev Keller (@bevieboooo) says it can sometimes be difficult to balance conflicting news values. Three weeks before I arrived, there was a murder in one of the Amish villages, and an Amish husband and his mistress were arrested on suspicion of killing his wife.

It had all the elements of a 'great' story - murder, an extra-marital relationship, a police hunt for the killer. It was of course all the more unusual because the protagonists were Amish - a pacifist people. To me, it was a front-page story with long-running potential for covering the trial and sentencing, for example.

But Keller ran it as a small piece below the fold on the front page to say a woman had been killed. To run anything more would be hugely distressing to the Amish community, even though it would potentially shift more copies of the paper to their local 'English' readers, she explains.

The part of the paper dedicated solely to the Amish is the national edition. This is 40-plus pages of letters from more than 400 Amish scribes in 41 states. These letters come via post or fax and the Budget's non-Amish staff spend a large proportion of their week typing them out.

The letters talk about the weather, the harvests, who hosted church that week, and who came to visit. Where national or international events are mentioned, there's often a very different spin on them. They question whether putting Neil Armstrong on the moon was really worth the expense, and for every major tragedy - the assassination of JFK or 9/11 - they remind readers to trust in God and find a greater purpose.

Many Amish still do not have phones in their own homes and the internet is still alien to them, so although an outsider might find some of the letters trivial - even tedious - the Budget is the Amish people's way to both keep abreast of the news and also keep in touch.

This letter format has been the same for 120 years, but I often found myself drawing parallels between the 'news values' in the letters and the ethos behind developments in the modern media such as audience interaction, microblogging and hyperlocal media.

The letters answer questions repeatedly posed by Facebook and Twitter - 'what's on your mind?', 'what are you thinking?' - and give an exact account of the issues affecting each individual Amish community. It's hyperlocal news, but they've been doing it for decades. That the paper has survived 120 years suggests these developments are worth investing in.

The website
The Budget's website was the aspect of the title I was most curious about before making my trip: how could an Amish newspaper have a website? The answer turned out to be fairly simple: the only content which goes online is the local - or non-Amish - content.

But the reasons behind this publishing decision are more complex. When publisher Keith Rathbun went live with a very basic Budget website in 2006, it contained just contact and subscription information about the paper.

The Associated Press got wind of the launch, wrote a story on it and many of the Amish communities panicked. They were furious at the Budget - which many of them feel a sense of ownership in - and worried their letters were being published online. They felt this would hold them up for ridicule, and leave them open to exploitation.

The relationship between the Amish and the Budget was badly damaged as a result even though Rathbun and his team hadn't even begun to think about putting the scribes' letters online.

Three years on, Rathbun would like to start up a dialogue with the Amish about the issue again. 'Amish' is a popular search term, and he believes there is a lot of misinformation out there.

He would much rather that when people googled Amish, they got the real deal and could find out about real Amish lives, he explains - The Budget could act as that medium. Put simply, he says, it could be a force for good.

"I need to find the way to get the readers and the Amish public to understand and embrace our franchise," he says.

But overall, The Budget is holding up well.

Loretta Harding, responsible for dealing with circulation at the title, says the paper has lost just 2,000 subscriptions over the last 14 years - a miniscule number compared to the plummeting Audit Bureau of Circulation figures reported for most newspapers in recent months.

The Budget has been using new media ideas for more than a century - user-generated content, hyperlocal news - and making them work in traditional formats.

Despite the global recession and challenges facing every media outlet, I was surprised to find an Amish newspaper in rural Ohio is coming out fighting - and doing it in its own way.

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