The surprising success of small papers

Marketplace had an interesting piece late last week: As big papers are famously losing both ad revenue and circulation, the hyper-local little papers that focus on the potholes and PTA meetings are doing quite well.

The New York Times would like you to believe otherwise. But even in this age of media consolidation, the Big Apple is no one-newspaper town.

There are two tabloids. There’s Newsday. There’s even competition between the freebie papers that get handed out during the morning rush hour.

And there’s a whole host of community papers that cover neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs and the suburbs.

It’s that last bunch that’s been getting a lot of attention lately. Last fall, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp — which owns the tabloid New York Post — bought up a chain of weeklies in Queens. And another in Brooklyn. Now, rumor has it, the media mogul’s looking to nab another one. In the Bronx.

These are papers whose biggest front-page headlines wouldn’t merit a brief in the New York Times’s Metro Section. So why would anyone want to buy them?

There’s probably only five people in the High Desert who have noticed — the Hesperia Star’s publisher, the head of advertising for the Daily Press and the three of us in the office on Main Street — but even as the real estate ads shrink, the Star has gone back up from 16 pages to 20. During a time of bad news for bigger papers with larger scopes, the Hesperia Star, with its focus on, well, potholes and PTA meetings is doing quite well.

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