If You Were To Start A Newspaper Today

That's true, Some Guy. If it was a small, rural community, the print product could still work. My point is simply that it would seem crazy to launch a printed newspaper TODAY, given the current climate.

 

Web-only. Subscription-based. Topical, not geographic in focus. Mostly freelance staff, to keep overhead low.

 

mrs. jps even recognizes that buying into a small community weekly or twice-weekly paper might well be a great option in the future. it's what I'd do.

 

Just the opposite guys. No matter where the "future" is supposedly residing, the money is still in print.

Small town, print only, minimal staff, lots of focus on sports and community events. Eff journalistic integrity, I want every Johnny and Janey who gets an A on a test to have their name in the paper. Then I schmooze the living hell out of every business owner in town, tongue-wash their golf balls if I have to.

Under no circumstances will I have a web site in which I print the daily content. The closest thing I'd have to a web presence is a site where you can purchase pictures from events.

 

There are lots of very small weeklies with very little revenue. Lots of listings here:

http://www.mediamergers.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewProperties&cat=2



Small towns sound easy, but the major advertising base (independent merchants) in most of them have been eaten alive by chains that only advertise in newspapers with inserts, if at all. So it would have to be a town with significant indy retail. Not many of those.

Given the original post's parameters ...

Why start a metro when you can buy an existing one cheap? San Diego, a premium market when the economy is good, sold for not much more than the value of its real estate recently. I read that Daytona Beach wants $25 million, which is absurdly low for a 90,000-circulation daily. Austin has been on the block awhile. There are bargains available for someone willing and able to take a loss for a few years.

There are multiple problems with starting a daily in cities that already have one. A shitload of No. 2 papers died in the early 1980s (some with 300,000 circ.) because advertisers generally decided it was more cost-effective to buy in just the No. 1 paper instead of both. There are huge upfront costs in buying a press and a building for it, and if you farm out the printing and delivery, you are going to get fucked so badly on deadlines that you might as well not even bother as far as sports, crime and late-night government meetings are concerned.

Given the parameters of having to start a daily -- the original point -- I'd look for a place where a decent-size paper just shut down for asinine reasons. In the 1990s, the NYT Co. folded a midsize daily outside Atlanta and a weekly turned daily to fill the void. Around the same time, a couple years after Tribune Co. folded a midsize daily in Palo Alto, a free daily popped up. Neither was anywhere near as good editorially as the paper it replaced, but the owners made money. So I probably would want to look hard at Ann Arbor. From the outside, it looks like Newhouse is making a stupid decision to fold the News -- as bad a move as the NYT Co. did in leaving Gwinnett County in Georgia. So it might be worth a risk. Even if you only got 30K circ (far less than the Ann Arbor News is selling now), you could do OK since in good times there is a lot of commerce in that town and the student population ensures that there always will be shops, bars and restaurants popping up.

 

I'd also look at Tempe/Scottsdale/Mesa. Shortsighted decision by Freedom Newspapers to turn the Trib into a shopper. Plenty of money there once the economy improves.

 

The Trib's still around in Mesa, but you're right about Scottsdale. There's a ton of money in that area. (And douchebags, but that's a different story.)

 

Frank, I think you're missing Boom's original point -- quite a bit, actually.

 

Slappy - My original question was not to make a point. Frank does offer an interesting twist in the idea of buying an undervalued existing paper.

The problem I have with that option it that it does not allow you to wipe the slate clean and build a paper around a new business model.

At first pass it seems like the weekly is a good option.

 

If print is where the money is, why aren't we all making money?

 

There used to be a lot of money in print.

Now there's less money in print, and not enough to cover a normal newspaper's expenses, but there's still an order of magnitude more revenue in print than there is on the web.

 

I don't know enough about the business side but I would open one in FLorida where there are all old people to buy it.