Selma Sun merges with Black Belt News Network, last print paper set for Aug. 28

After 10 years of evolution, the Selma Sun will officially merge into the Black Belt News Network starting Sept. 1.

This means the print version of the Selma Sun will end with the Aug. 28 edition so my staff and I can put all our energy and focus on producing compelling stories and videos for the 1.2 million visitors a year who read our content online at BlackBeltNewsNetwork.com.

Online readership of the Black Belt News Network has increased dramatically by sharing headlines through daily e-mail newsletters and by posting multiple stories every day on social media platforms, driving traffic to our online news site.

Meanwhile, print journalism has struggled nationwide for many years, and it’s been no exception for the Selma Sun. Paid readership of the Selma Sun has decreased over the last several years while the costs of delivering the print product – printing, layout, mailing, even stocking the newspaper racks – have steadily increased. 

By eliminating the costs of a print product, the combined Black Belt News Network can continue to bring enlightening spotlights of residents, businesses and schools along with key information and resources to Selma-Dallas County. We can also produce news stories for more communities across the region in need of information, including Perry, Wilcox, Marengo and Montgomery counties. We plan to expand to more Black Belt counties in the future.

To position ourselves for the future, the network recently became a hybrid nonprofit with the addition of a fiscal sponsor. That allowed us to secure more than $150,000 in grants and donations in one year. The network is now well on its way to becoming a full nonprofit by the end of 2025, which will open the doors to many more grant and foundation dollars that will add to its long-term sustainability.

Nonprofit news is a new business model to Alabama readers, but it has become a solid structure for many agencies to succeed and grow, including the Mississippi Free Press and Texas Tribune. 

The Selma Sun’s team of journalists with more than 150 years of combined experience will continue our work with the Black Belt News Network. We will also continue to hire residents to cover events and meetings as community correspondents. BBNN’s mission is to connect our communities by providing a platform and audience for the community to share stories and information that help us all succeed and grow.

While national grants and foundations will make up a good portion of our revenue, the Black Belt News Network will need the community – readers and supporters in the Black Belt – to invest in our regional news site by providing regular contributions, much like NPR’s model. Join this movement by making a tax-deductible donation now at BlackBeltNewsNetwork.com by hitting the red Donate Now button.

The merger of the Selma Sun into the Black Belt News Network is part of an ongoing evolution. The Selma Sun opened in 2015 by a lawyer and accountant team out of Birmingham. Publisher Cindy Fisher bought it in 2018 and started initiating ways to make the Selma Sun successful. She evolved the newspaper from a smaller tabloid size to the bigger broadsheet-sized newspaper in 2019. That year, she also built SelmaSun.com to offer news online all the time. By 2020, she moved the Selma Sun’s office to the prominent spot it has today on Broad Street within sight of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. She started recording a weekly newscast out of a studio created in the back of the office that now gets 1,000 views a week.

The biggest evolution came in March 2023, when the Selma Sun became a sister publication to the new, expanded regional news site Black Belt News Network. Fisher was surprised by BBNN’s quick success, going from 40,000 page views a month the first year to 100,000 the second year – a significantly larger audience than SelmaSun.com ever garnered.

That led to the decision to merge SelmaSun.com into BlackBeltNewsNetwork.com to create a stronger site. That site went live earlier this month.

Discontinuing the print edition has been considered for years as revenue associated with the product dropped and expenses increased, although the exact date had not been set. It has been decided that now – Aug. 28 – is that time.

All the stories from the Selma Sun are in the archives of BlackBeltNewsNetwork.com. Previous editions going back to 2015 are in our hard copy archives as PDFs. 

Read Fisher’s column next week to get an idea of what the Selma Sun has meant to her and share your thoughts to her at publisher@selmasun.com.