OCRegister publisher: The Hesperia Star is the future!
Well, OK, Orange County Register publisher Terry Horne didn’t say that exactly, but pretty close:
Horne believes the combination of offerings will fill gaps for both readers and advertisers. The subscription-based Register will include premium content targeted at a mostly older readership. Free community weeklies go to a broader base with a hyper-local focus. OCregister.com will provide free content to a younger audience. Local advertisers will have a similar choice to get their message out on any or all of these platforms.
The strategy is in response to what he calls the perfect storm: advertising revenue is down 14 percent; newsprint price increases have added $5 million to annual costs with more price hikes on the way; and paid circulation continues to decline, down 3 percent in the six months ended Sept. 30.
Horne implemented a series of changes last month to address the immediate crisis, including 25 layoffs, consolidation of the stand-alone business section into the main news section, elimination of the stock tables, the end of Business Monday and a new system dividing local news into six separate geographic zones.
“We’re trying to create a newspaper to serve Orange County given the economic challenges that we face today,” Horne said.
Nothing like this has been announced in the High Desert — or, if it has, no one is telling me — but I could certainly imagine something like this working here. The other day, Peter was just commenting that it seems like our online audience and our print audience overlap, but are, for the most part, very different.
If I were publisher — and that’s as funny to me as it no doubt is to you — I might have Star-like papers in Adelanto, Apple Valley, Barstow, Hesperia, Oak Hills, Victorville and maybe one or two other areas. There would be no Daily Press news staff. Every day, an editor in Victorville would grab the day’s stories from each of the outlying regions, and stick it in a (slimmed down) Press-Dispatch, but the focus at each of the bureaus would be the weekly free publications, which would run longer stories of local interest that might (or might not) matter to anyone else in the High Desert. Online, a similar structure would exist, with the Press-Dispatch site working like HighDesert.com does now, and just serve as a portal to all the individual sites, showing new stories as they appear.
Readers would win, because they would have their choice of daily regional coverage (for a modest fee) or free weekly coverage of exclusively local information. Advertisers would have a choice of reaching either a general audience or a very narrow, very specific one. (It’s probable that different advertisers are interested in residents in Apple Valley than are interested in Adelanto residents, for instance.)
I’m sure there are problems with this model: I don’t have access to all the information about costs or long-term contracts or what have you. Still, I bet the OCR plan works to a large degree. We shall see.
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The Times thinks Talking Points Memo is the future
Comment by Joel — February 25, 2008 @ 7:52