DU QUOIN, Ill. — It seems counterintuitive now that most people get news from digital devices but an Illinois publisher found success keeping his newspaper almost entirely offline, and away from Facebook as much as possible.

Jeff Egbert decided it’s more profitable to run the Perry County Weekly-Press without a website. That requires people to buy a copy or subscribe, and makes it harder to copy and republish his work online.

“I get a lot of grief from my journalism friends about that,” he said. “But we had one for a while, and I was killing my rack sales because we put our two or three big stories up for the week on the website. Well, there was no reason for anybody to go buy the paper.”

The decision paid off.…