Whither the Beleaguered Times: Go Weekly?
(News item: The Seattle Times announces some 200 layoffs, including dozens in news and other editorial departments.)
I made two excellent decisions during my 30-year newspaper career. The first was to go into daily newspapering in 1970 – just before the Watergate scandal launched newspapers into one last glory period of prosperity and professional prestige. The second was to bail out in 2001 and move to Port Townsend – so I would not have to stay and watch them die.
The death spiral at the Seattle Times and other metro dailies carries an air of inevitability. But it’s worth noting the economics of some 7,000 American newspapers, mostly small town weeklies, which are doing just fine. Take, for example, the weekly Port Townsend Leader, where I write a now-and-then column. Each week, the Leader sells 8,400 papers in a county of 30,000 people and 12,000 households – an amazing market penetration of 70 percent. And it makes money.
Maybe the economic grim reaper is taking a little longer to find us out here in the provinces. Or perhaps weeklies are providing something not found in metro dailies, nor the Internet. Weeklies, after all, face the same competition. Most of us out here in the boonies now have cable TV and computers with high-speed Internet. Many of us get a Seattle daily or the New York Times delivered as well. So why pay six bits a week for the local weekly?
Because weekly newspapers understand that journalism, like politics, starts at home. The Leader offers no national or world news; that we get from NPR, CNN, or online. But it makes itself indispensible by printing the information people need – high school sports and movie times, agendas for this week’s school board and city council meetings, ferry schedules and tide tables, calendars of upcoming lectures and charity auctions and upcoming night classes on diesel maintenance or Internet marketing.
And then there are the ads. The dailies are not losing readers nearly as fast as they lose advertisers. This is because metro dailies long ago raised ad rates beyond the reach of most local merchants, relying instead on national advertisers; now they’re losing those national ads as well. But community papers like the Leader still rely on stacks of ads for local hardware and feed stores, barber shops and realtors.
What’s the lesson here for the Seattle Times and other metro dailies? Think local. Most readers already know who won last night’s ballgame, or the Pennsylvania primary. But who will tell me what the Seattle City Council is up to? Or how the port is spending all those easy tax dollars? Or why the state ferry system is in disarray?
The greater challenge is, of course, how to lure back those ads. Can dailies break up their product into packages that can be priced within reach of local merchants? Years ago, The Times tried going local with zoned editions north, south and east. Alas, zone staffers are at the top of this week’s list of layoffs.
Somehow, an organization that has been trying to think big and regional, has to think small and local. And maybe that simply is not do-able, unless you are already small and local, and you’ve learned to like it.
