Since I work in the business I get asked often about the state of newspaper industry.
Sure, there is a lot of gloomy news that comes out about the imminent death of newspapers. A few things in my background that help explain the perspective that I view the situation through:
-I grew up in a newspaper household. There was never a time that the newspaper was not a part of the daily routine. In fact, during most of my childhood my parents subscribed to two daily newspapers and read them both every day. At present time, they subscribe to three! They may be single-handedly trying to save the newspaper industry.
-I began working in the industry in 2002. Obviously, this is well past the heyday of the daily newspaper, and well into its decline.
-The vast majority of my newspaper experience has come from working at weekly, or community, newspapers. So although I believe that daily newspapers have a role of importance in today's market, much of my beliefs are not those of your normal newspaper person.
Anyways, the current model of the daily newspaper will not survive. Those that do survive are ones that will adapt, and FAST. It probably means it will no longer be "daily". We've been seeing this already throughout the country. Some papers are eliminating their Monday edition, some are talking of going to 3 or 4 days a week.
To me, less days per week just make sense to me. People are so busy that I just do not think that there are that many people, even among subscribers, that read the paper every single day. I would love to see a real unbiased study done about this. Of course paid daily newspapers would want you to believe that since the readers are paying they each read the paper cover-to-cover every day.
The other major problem (other than frequency) is type of content. Traditionally, the "newspaper" was all inclusive. Your one source for world, national, regional, and local news, in addition to comics, horoscope, crosswords, real estate advertising, automotive advertising, private party advertising, etc.
Well, flash forward to 2009. For all of those things i have just listed, there are more accessible "free" alternatives available online that are the same or better. For example, people browse private party for sale ads on craigslist. You can read your horoscope on any of thousands of websites. Same goes for world news and national news. Your local newspaper offers nothing unique on any of these topics.
With the great exception of one: LOCAL NEWS. Where else are you going to get your local news? CNN, the New York Times, even the Seattle Times, are not sending reporters out to Lynnwood, Bothell, or anywhere, unless something catestrophic were to happen.
So, basically strip away all of the other things about the newspaper that other people are doing bigger and better, and we're left with local news. Which is the most difficult and expensive to produce. This has been a difficult change for daily newspapers to adapt to. It becomes more challenging the larger the distribution area of a daily.
Back to weekly, or community, newspapers. Guess what? Their focus of coverage, and really 95% of their content, is and has always been LOCAL NEWS. We don't have to worry about the competition for content. In most all cases we are the only one with an in-depth article of the High School basketball game. Or about a local resident organizing a fundraiser.
And they are already once a week in most cases. Not content overload, as well as without the overhead of printing and distributing a newspaper every day. The costs of printing and distributing a daily paper alone are a huge burden.
As an interesting side note, the USPS, another institution in very troubling times, is also looking at reducing a day of service.
So that's why I think community newspapers are well positioned to weather the storm.
I haven't even mentioned online. But you can guess where I would go with that - local.
No comments:
Post a Comment