Great Newspaper Markets

You can diss the paper all you want, but in the recently released Scarborough report it has a 79 percent market penetration with the print product, which is astonishingly high even for a monopoly market. I believe I read a couple years ago that it had the highest penetration of any sizable market in the country. So regardless of the paper's quality, it's a great newspaper market in that people there read the newspaper.

I've never been impressed by Buffalo. It has a small staff considering its circ, and in the late 1990s it was reported that it had the highest profit margin of any publicly-owned paper in the country:

http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/98/6/buffett.asp

I think Albany's a pretty good market. The Albany paper is decent for its size, Schenectady is only about 50K but is a complete newspaper with enough news of the outside world that you don't need another paper, and nearby is Glens Falls, one of the best 30K in the nation.

 

South Florida is way underrated. One of the most competitive markets and for the most part, the papers have done well thanks in large part to having a shitload of bluehairs as readers...

 

Good to hear about Lancaster, Buffalo and some other places I wouldn't think of as being "places to be" - thinking more of economics rather than the sports scene around those spots.

OTOH, if you stick a thumbtack on Houston, TX - one of the most economically prosperous cities in the country right now - and go in a 30-mile circle from there, you will find that it sucks ass.

The Chronicle has no impetus for being any better, being free of metro-wide daily competition since 1995 when the Houston Post closed. A few dailies in the area have either closed or got turned into less-than-dailies. For a top-10 US metro area it's underwhelming. TV and radio aren't much better.

 

But the market also has a very high percentage of people who do not speak English. It's a very challenging market, which is why the papers are as good as they are.

 

All three are excellent, although Palm Beach has seen better days...

 

OK, my two cents:

1. Dallas -- I've often said, cuts or no cuts, that Dallas and Fort Worth readers are very well served by the DMN and the FWST.

2. Pittsburgh -- The P-G could use a really good makeover because it still looks like it's stuck in the 1970s for the most part, but it's still a good paper. T-R is also good, especially its tab sport section weekdays and Saturdays.

3. NY -- Some papers better than others, but Post, DN, NYT, Newsday and Newark form a potent package.

4. LA -- It isn't what it was, but LA Times and OCR still decent. Wild card is the P-E in Riverside... Belo's insulated that paper from heavy cuts and it reads very well.

5. Miami -- Herald, S-S and Palm Beach are three nice papers.

 

There's not really competition among these three. It's almost like three different markets.

LAT is heavy in L.A., the Valley and the West Side.

OCR is Orange County.

And the P-E leads in the Inland Empire, where there are more than 3 million people but still in the L.A. TV market, but doesn't dominate. It's core is Riverside/Corona/Moreno Valley. But there's tons more to the I-E.

And with the Singleton gutting of the other papers out there, there's an opening for the P-E to expand and totally dominate the I.E. region but it hasn't/won't.

 

Which is too bad, because P-E is still pretty good. You have to wonder if LADN would be better off under Hearst's ownership. Hasn't hurt Houston so far for the most part.

I would have said San Francisco five years ago, but Singleton fucked that city up beyond belief.

 

I had heard that about Florence, that it had slipped a bit.
That's a shame. Florence used to be rock solid, if you did anything GSC-related, it was pretty much a must read.
One of their guys, used to do all the D-II coverage for Sporting News and the rest.
I strongly suspect that he must not be around anymore.
Naples and Fort Meyers at least did have good papers. St. Pete and Tampa, until recently, was also pretty good.

 

I was wrong about Albany . . . Schenectady, Glens Falls, Saratoga and Troy are all more or less part of the same market, so there certainly in competition there.

 

I think the Scarborough number refers to total penetration of all products -- daily paper, web site, youth-oriented free weekly and a bevy of niche pubs. You get counted among the 79 percent if you so much as used a copy of "Our Pets" as a makeshift pooper-scooper for your poodle; Pubs like that and "Roc Moms" are informationally inconsequential.

And as for the daily paper, it's neither a great paper nor in a great market. Gatehouse Media has a small nearby daily and a chain of suburban weeklies in the market -- all undistinguished -- and there are five TV newsrooms. The concept of competing for stories ended when Gannett merged its AM and PM newsrooms into a single staff and then eventually shuttered the PM.

 

I thought Warrenton, Va., was a remarkable little newspaper market, with two really excellent "big" weeklies – the broadsheet Times-Democrat and the tabloid Citizen. The FTD aspired to be the newspaper of record and the Citizen, started by folks who has led the other paper, was more of a magazine-style effort with a lot of features and neat design.

The demographics, in horse country with a fast-growing bedroom community element, was enough to support both.

The thing is, the people who started the tab remind me of the joke that "an entrepreneur is a guy who will work 80 hours a week for himself because he resents working 40 hours a week for somebody else." They eventually burned out and sold the Citizen to the company that owns the other paper in town. Darn shame, that.