Newspapers: not dead yet
It’s sort of scary — touching, but scary — when Hesperia Unified School District employees ask me if my job is secure. The answer is that yes, it is.
(My role is at least; it’s certainly possible that I will sufficiently irritate my corporate masters to the point where someone else will be sitting in my chair.)
Although I can’t give details — frankly, the numbers go in one ear and out the other, even if I wanted to spill all the beans, which I don’t — the Hesperia Star is profitable. Quite so, when you compare the cost of doing business to the revenue generated.
And despite published doom and gloom to the contrary, it’s not alone in this regard:
There are a thousand daily newspapers in this country — 70 percent of the total — that for the most part remain solidly profitable and are in no danger of collapse, despite a lot of loose talk about newspapers being on the verge of extinction.
These are the newspapers with circulations of 50,000 or less — their average circulation is less than 12,000 — that serve readers and advertisers in the nation’s smaller towns and cities. For millions of Americans and across great swaths of the nation, they are the newspaper business, not the larger metropolitan dailies whose troubles we hear so much about.
True, there are pockets of the nation where even small dailies are suffering; Michigan, with its grossly depressed automobile economy, is a notable example. But in the main, based on my own consulting for companies that own small dailies and conversations with others, the typical smaller newspaper continues to prosper, albeit at a lower profit level than two or three years ago.
Going forward, the large metro dailies will be thinner in size, content, distribution and just about everything else, continuing a trend already under way. Smaller dailies will become even more hyperlocal. One can only hope that newspapers will figure out a way to stop giving away information online that they charge for in print and that they will be more successful than they have been in capturing Internet advertising.
While there’s a lot of prognostication — a fancy word for “please, someone, figure out how to stop the bleeding” — about the future of the newspaper, this piece by American Journalism Review’s John Morton seems right to me.
In the age of the Internet and far-too-ubiquitous Associated Press news (their iPhone app is awesome, says Mr. Part of the Problem), there is absolutely no need to read national or international news in your local paper, unless there’s a local angle or the paper offers some local insight, instead of just regurgitating what can be found everywhere else. (The scene in The Paper where the editors skip any international news that doesn’t include locals somehow is spot-on.)
In contrast, there’s nowhere else to get local news, most of the time, other than the local paper. That’s what has value to the consumer, and thus is valuable real estate for advertisers. Associated Press membership is crazy expensive — it costs as much as a good portion of any newspaper’s newsroom, or more than a full newsroom, some of the time — and is of rapidly declining value to the paper.
Whether in print or online (I’m betting on the latter), local newspapers will survive because they’re offering content that no one else really has shown a sustained interest in providing — not bloggers, or folks on Twitter, or anything. Once the industry reorients itself around local news rather than one-size-fits-all paper products that are wildly outdated in a world with Google News, the bad news about newspapers will start to taper off pretty quickly.
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