Wash. Post columnist: Time to shut down the small papers

Yes. Because as the ground falls away beneath us all and the newspaper business collapses around us, what's most important is to allow no new thought. To consider no new solution. To conceive no new ideas. To brook no new debate. To discuss no answers, alternatives, or remedies - however outrageous, far-fetched or unlikely.

What's most important in any crisis is to keep doing exactly what brought on the crisis in the first place. Then complain that the crisis continues.

"It is what it is," right Boots?

Jesus.

 

I was thinking about what The JG said and it seems like I remember an experiment that the WSJ tried a few years back.
Seems like they tried branded WSJ business pages that could be purchased to run in daily papers on Sundays. The pages were built with holes for ads and it seems like it wen over fairly well, but when papers started slashing newshole, the space for the pages went away.
I've always wondered though, what if the WSJ or Bloomberg got in the daily paper business section business.
As papers drop business sections, it seems like the opportunity is there to do something.
Both have bureau reporters scattered across the country. They could do regional reporting, put together a localized daily briefing roundup of what is going on. One, maybe two local/regional stories and rest be original content from Bloomberg or WSJ.
If enough papers got on board, you could put together a pretty appealing section for national and regional advertisers.

 

But he won a Pulitzer!

 

Well, there has been continual reinvention of newspapers for the entirety of my lifetime. The problem is that all the innovations have been spawns of the same (IMO, flawed) premises:

1.) People's attention spans are short. Give them a newspaper that can be navigated in five minutes.

2.) Covering city council and the planning board is boring. They'd rather read about the guy three blocks away who grew a tomato that looks like Satan.

3.) Electronic media are faster, so let's play down what actually happened in town today and not try to compete on breaking news.

4.) It is not worth studying what made newspapers successful to begin with because we live in different times now. (Because of radio. Because of TV. Because of battery-powered, portable transistor radios. Because of color TV. Because of cable TV. Because of the Internet. Because of WiFi. Because of ...)

 

Actually, Steve, my 12k paper does a pretty freaking good job of delivering local and national news. Thanks for stopping by though.

 

I'm one of the guys who has to go out and photograph that Satan-esque tomato.
No joke.
Took a pic several years of a potato a couple grew that was heart-shaped. The pic had the couple cozied up to one another, with each holding onto the potato. The caption: Love spud.

 

Ouch...

 

They're not dead, Jay, and in fact, I know of a paper in my neck of the woods that is thinking about implementing the service.

 

I think the small papers will survive because of the attraction of local news and events that the metros won't cover.

Sure, I can get the latest news on the Blagojevich scandal and the NFL report from about 100 different sources. But where am I going to get the scoop on the local school board meeting, or the mayor's race or how Podunk High's football team did last week?

I visited a small (under 20,000) town last summer whose paper didn't run ANY wire. It was ALL local copy. Not so interesting for the tourist like me, but I suppose the locals ate it up. And, yeah, the rack at the grocery store also offered USA Today, the NYT and a statewide edition of a metro 200 miles up the road. So plenty of variety available.

I don't see small, locally driven dailies disappearing anytime very soon.

 

The small papers will survive because they can give readers what larger papers cannot -- local coverage. The large papers will survive because they have the resources to do so. The papers I stress about are the ones in the middle, especially in the 30-90K range. I think it all depends on their location. The ones near a metro area will likely get swallowed up. The ones that exist in their own area without a lot of outside competition will likely make it. Some that are near one another -- say Fort Myers and Naples in Florida, for instance -- could easily combine their resourses.

 

Small papers aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Whether they will remain dailies or not, that's more of a realistic debate. I think it's not out of the realm of possibility that most papers will eventually go to 2-4 times a week, regardless of size, making dailies a thing of the past.

 

I was thinking about this the other day.
When I graduated from college, you had a pretty good selection of dailies to work at in my state. Some were really small, like under 5k daily, but they were proud to be family-owned and many people got their start at them
Including the 3k PM daily that was my first fulltime job.
All but one of the under 5K papers still prints five or more times a week. Most are weeklies and they are still struggling.
The larger small dailies, say under 20k are now all basically owned by one of two companies instead of the newspaper publisher families that once roamed the state.
The state-wide metro isn't growing, and its daily circ has dropped between 1 and 2 percent.
The larger dailies, the ones over 30k, they are holding steady, to adding small increases.
I suspect what is happening here, is happening elsewhere, the really small dailies, the ones who never got the wire in the first place are dead. They have all become weeklies. Many of the medium sized dailies, between 10 and 20k didn't print seven days a week in the first place, so they won't be cutting editions.
Does any of this sound familiar to anyone else?
Have all the small dailies died?