NPA Changes Dues Schedule

The Nevada Press Association Board of Directors last week approved a proposal to change the trade association’s membership dues schedule in 2022. Under the new schedule, Regular Member and Affiliate Member dues rates will be based on newsroom Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs) rather than circulation or readership. FTEs measure an organization’s full-time employees by counting 40-hour workweeks instead of the number of individuals on the payroll.

Dues invoices will also be issued later this year to coincide with NPA’s fiscal year, which begins on May 1. They will be mailed and/or emailed the first two weeks of May.

Under the previous dues structure, annual dues for newspaper members (i.e., Regular Members) were based on circulation, with separate scales for daily and weekly papers. Magazines and online-only news organizations, which were first granted full membership rights in 2019, paid one of two different rates that hinged on whether their readership is predominantly statewide or local.

[Click here to see a comparison of the old and new dues structure.] NOTE: COMPARISON WAS REVISED MAY 6 TO RESOLVE CONFLICTS IN SCHEDULE

FTEs are often used to track project costs within an organization or unit costs in a firm with several subdivisions. Unlike circulation, newsroom FTEs is a relatively stable standard common to all of NPA’s member news organizations. It’s also a rough proxy for the size of an organization’s budget and is relatively simple to calculate. NPA is asking its members to count hours worked within the news department by their editors, reporters and photographers, or other multimedia journalists, when calculating their newsroom FTEs.

In making these changes, NPA’s aim was to maintain the organization’s total dues revenue close to $31,000 — its annual total in 2021 — and to keep the annual dues of most member news organizations close to what they have paid in the past. The new dues structure does that.