The “hyper-local” and multimedia approach to newspapering has made it into today’s edition of Marketplace:
Scott Anthony is president of the consulting company Innosight. (By the way, Innosight has done a lot of work with the newspaper business. But wasn’t directly involved in any of the changes you’ll hear about in this piece.) He says the industry’s finally coming around to the idea that printing a newspaper online is not the solution. Instead, it needs to find a new model.
Take the Journal News. A paper that covers the suburban counties north of New York City. The kind of hometown paper most people read. It’s owned by Gannett, the chain that owns USA Today.
There, as at other Gannett papers, the big move has been toward local news. Not just local in the sense of focusing on, say, the city of White Plains. But what the company calls hyperlocal.
Henry Freeman’s the editor there.
Henry Freeman: We’ve gotten pretty aggressive here at community conversation.
That means creating ways, such as online forums and discussion boards, for readers to participate in the coverage. And then actually paying attention to what readers are saying. Which, Freeman says, has changed the paper’s coverage:
Freeman: It’s made us realize stories we thought were over and done with that there’s still an interest in them. It’s made us sometimes realize something that we still think is a big story really has died down out there and there’s not a lot new in it.
What readers are talking about plays a big role in the standup “huddles” that have replaced the old-style morning meeting. Which instead of being just a couple of editors now includes anybody in the newsroom who’s interested in chiming in.
But chat rooms and discussion boards are just one part of the paper’s other brave new strategy. Diana Costello is the paper’s education reporter:
Diana Costello: It’s no longer just about putting an article in the newspaper. It’s now also updating a blog. Assigning videos. Writing TV scripts, producing your own videos for the blog and really just looking at the story from as many different angles as you possibly can to make it as rich for the viewer or the reader.
The paper also produces a couple of glossy magazines and a TV show. The multi-platform approach, as the paper calls it, also makes it easier to go hyperlocal. The Journal News has, for example, extensive coverage of the local Little League, and will cover every one of the 90-odd graduations in the area this spring.
All of this has changed the old product, the daily paper. Breaking stories — like a freak wind storm that passed through the area late one afternoon, taking down power lines and trees — end up being covered on the Web. What appears in the print edition tends to be more analysis and less news story.
Sounds good to me. We don’t have the resources to cover the out-of-town graduations that are standard for Hesperia schools, but this model sounds exactly like what Peter and I are trying to do with the Hesperia Star.
 I’m not naturally comfortable watching an MTV reality show — I have to draw the line somewhere — but I have to say, The Paper is improbably entertaining. (iTunes has the first episode available as a free download, which is how I became aware of the show.) It’s all the ridiculous drama of a newsroom combined with all of the ridiculous drama of high school.
Heck, it even makes me sympathetic for an editor-in-chief. Inconceivable!
Very much a guilty pleasure.
 Tonight, the Hesperia Star won the most SPJ awards in the paper’s eight year history: five, including two for editorial writing.
As always, it was surprising to see what won, and what didn’t. The wildfires of last spring were popular at the awards, and my piece, Smoke-Out, won a third place award in the Breaking News Category. I don’t think the piece is as strong as my story about a Hesperia sheriff’s deputy being shot, but that’s how it goes.
My earlier guess was wrong: I did win an award about an infamous necrophiliac finally getting prison time in connection with his earlier violation of a child’s corpse. I was thrown off the scent because the award wasn’t listed as a Daily Press win, despite the story appearing in that paper. This also marks the fourth year in a row that I’ve won a Law Enforcement/Legal Affairs award (first time getting a first place award, and only my second first place award from the SPJs ever), which I worry will misrepresent what I was covering in Hesperia these years in future job interviews. No awards for my school board coverage or my California Charter Academy coverage, for instance, which dominated much of 2007 for me. Go figure.
And then there’s the award I have the most mixed feelings about: A second place editorial writing award for my piece on being a Virginia Tech alumnus in the wake of last April’s massacre. Jenn and Sharon have already stressed to me that I’m not capitalizing on a tragedy, but it still feels odd.
Overall, the Freedom High Desert papers cleaned up, with the Barstow Desert Dispatch in particular doing well — I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t been reading their multiple award-winning blog, but I clearly need to, especially since Peter wants one added to the Star’s site ASAP.
As always, it was a (reasonably) good time, although it almost feels like a Riverside Press-Enterprise recruiting event, between the ton of awards the PE and its associated papers get, and how happy everyone from the paper always looks (especially given the number of non-award-winning PE staffers who show up just to show support).
Peter got two awards as well: One was an editorial piece about founding father Val Shearer leaving Hesperia and the other was an entertainment piece about swing band Phat Cat Swinger. Peter always excels when writing about music, and it’s nice to see that recognized.
The full list of awards, and judges’ comments for many of them, will appear in the next day or so at the SPJ blog.
Another issue of American Journalism Review, another issue packed with timely pieces. If only every newspaper was as good as this magazine that covers them.
Here’s a piece that speaks directly to the economics of running a paper like the Hesperia Star:
There were 600 newspaper people at the New York Press Association conference in Saratoga Springs in April 2006, ages 18 to 80, all races, men, women, straight, gay — whatever variation of newsperson you might imagine. English, Creole, Spanish, Hindi and more were heard in the halls.
The energy could have lifted the roof off the old Gideon Putnam Hotel.
That was the first time I heard it: Weekly newspapers are the only growing niche in print journalism.
Tom Ward, a refugee from chain dailies in Woonsocket and West Warwick, Rhode Island, told me how he started the free-circulation Valley Breeze with two colleagues in his living room in Cumberland, a growing suburb between the two aging mill towns. That was 10 years ago; in 2006, he had just moved to modern offices and was putting out an ad-heavy, 68-page-plus tab.
I spent a morning with Paul Bass, who after 25 years in print founded the online, nonprofit New Haven Independent (newhavenindependent.org) to cover the hometown news he perceived newspapers were ignoring. Using NPR as his model, he obtained grants from various foundations — to cover health-care issues, for instance (see “Nonprofit News,” February/March) — and relies on readers’ contributions to make up the difference.
Tim Ryan, president and publisher of the Westerly Sun in Rhode Island, instructed me in the benefits of “localness” beyond what a daily can provide. He had spun off four free-circulation broadsheets to attract very local advertisers.
There was no shortage of advice: from Ron and Charlotte Bartizek, who had owned the Dallas Post in Pennsylvania; from Tony Jones and Vicki Simons, who grew the tiny Roe Jan Independent into the countywide Hillsdale Independent in New York; from Gary and Helen Sosniecki at the Vandalia Leader in Missouri.
In short, it didn’t take long to figure out that many brainy, ambitious, independent people had already done what I was determined to do. Bob Estabrook, former Washington Post editorial page editor, then the paper’s chief foreign correspondent, clinched it for me: His three-decade association with the Lakeville Journal in Connecticut — beginning when he was about my age, 54 — were the most satisfying years of his life, he said.
Along the way it had dawned on me: 90 percent of the businesses on any Main Street — pizza joints, dry cleaners, gift shops — have simply been priced out of advertising in the dailies.
And not because of the cost of putting out a newspaper; no, those hefty if shrinking profit margins are needed, not just for operating expenses, but to pay off massive debt and keep up the stock price.
Middling-sized chain dailies are looking to average $15 to $20 an inch for advertising; the open rate is often twice that. Working through the numbers, it looked to me like a weekly could survive, even flourish, at $7, $8 or $9 an inch. Bingo.
The economics of 21st century weekly newspapering rapidly came into focus. Only one computer was serviceable at the level we were moving to. For just $7,000, we obtained two workhorse Dells, five PCs and a copier. Every town has techies galore — ours was Mike Hand from Cherry Valley — and he networked us, hanging wire over the firehouse’s primitive beams.
Within a matter of days, predawn 55-mile drives to the printer were a thing of the past. With a click and a drag, we could load the newspaper onto our printer’s FTP site, then take a leisurely drive up the following morning to pick up that week’s masterpiece.
We spent $1,000 on a Canon EOS-20D, (now down to $799). I commandeered M.J.’s Canon PowerShot ($350 then, $280 now) as backup. Our photography challenges were resolved.
M.J. and I identified cost centers, and pinched them off one by one.
We had a circulation driver — I loved his red, white and blue Mohawk — but when the June 2006 Susquehanna flooding stranded him at home in Schenevus, we discovered we could do without him and save $500 a week. M.J. and I each took a route, and divided the rest up among the staff.
A printing house in Utica was handling subscriptions, another $500 a week. Bill Garber’s Interlink of Berrien Springs, Michigan, provided the program that allows us to print our own labels and cut postage to about $200. Mailing the papers from Cooperstown (and Hartwick, and Fly Creek) also got them to subscribers sooner. (Half of the papers are delivered and half are mailed.)
Printing is a competitive business. We were paying $1,200 a week. If we paid by check at the loading dock, we could print for half that at Sun Printing in Norwich, New York, a shorter drive, too.
Those steps alone, a little dead-reckoning arithmetic will tell you, saved tens of thousands.
(A caveat: Watch your expenses. When, after a year, we moved to well-appointed new offices on the other side of town, the new desks, new phones, carpet and wiring resulted in the one major bump in our fiscal road to date.)
Ironically, we at the Star can benefit very little from this article, since we’re already doing most of this. Still, it’s nice to see someone else do the math and come up with a similar number.
I will be making a return visit to the Lockridge Report on Road Dog Trucking Radio, Sirius channel 147, to talk about the resolution of Hesperia’s trucking ordinance changes. I’ll be on at noon, Pacific time.
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