Will Other Newspapers Follow Into The "3 Days a Week!" Publishing Cycle?

For at least the next decade, I think there's an odd dynamic at play for local newspapers. I work for a chain of local weeklies with a website that we update seven days a week, and with a lot of web stories we still have many readers asking "when is that going to be in the paper?" No one is ever satisfied to find out that many of our web stories don't run in print.

I believe we're still at a point where the people who consume local news (prep sports, city council, school board, local festivals, local theater groups, local business stories, etc.) want it in print. It'll change eventually. But that change is going to come slowly, over time. Right now people view the web as a place to go for major news, pro and college sports, viral videos and social networking. People don't think web-first when it comes to local news. If they're interested in that type of news at all -- which is a big if in some places -- they think, "the local paper will have that."

So the idea of going to weekly publication may not work as well as we'd like to think. I agree with your overall point, Mystery Meat II. In terms of dollars and cents it seems like the right thing to do. But no one has solved the mystery -- no pun intended -- of how to sell enough local ads for the web. At my place, web ads account for only a tiny percentage of our overall ad revenue. Lots of difficult questions here, and no answers. But for right now I think a daily hurts itself a lot more by going weekly than it does by going to three times a week.

 

I'm actually surprised more of the (soon to be former) Media General community papers didn't go that route after they took one of the chain's bigger dailies down to a 3-day publication ... of course, the move didn't help the paper's downward slide in circulation (made it worse) and opened the door for a competing pub of nearly the same circ to make gains ...

 

I believe the dailies in Eden and Reidsville dialed back to twice-weekly a few years ago. Surprised Concord (assuming that's who you're talking about) went that route, but I don't know the area all that well. Did a phoner for an SE job there six years ago, but never heard anything.

 

Finding the key to monetizing news content on the Internet is like finding the one needle in the haystack that picks the lock to the shed keeping the goose that lays golden eggs filled with four-leaf clovers and genies. But I think if you made the call to do non-daily, it's easier to sell a weekly paper than a semi-daily. People know the Sunday paper, even if for the coupons and car ads. They're not as likely to remember three seemingly random publication dates. Plus it's easier to gameplan a weekly paper -- everything has shelf life, only live stuff from Saturday -- than a twice or thrice-weekly, which would have a weird mish-mash of current and day-old content. And with a weekly paper, the answer to "when is such-and-such story going to be printed?" the answer would almost consistently be "check the next week's Tinytown Times!"

 

Pretty sure he's talking about Concord.

 

There isn't a newspaper company in America that isn't interested in finding out if this works.
Even if a paper doesn't go to it, figure it will be discussed anytime a union or an employee asks for a bump. If ad revenues drop less than expenses drop, it will be called a win.
I do hope all of the new three day a weekers have extended all of the subscriptions at least 100 percent.

 

John Connor: Are you here to kill me?

 

Nice one, TP.

 

ty, TH.

 

Mail delivery and three days a week are not exclusive. In fact, if you only publish three days a week you are not really care about maintaining a late deadline to catch that last score. So I think you will see both.

 

Make people pay for the three days, and these same people get full web content (updated constantly). Those who do not pay get a VERY limited version of the web page, maybe only the first 20-25 words of a story) and your shit better be local.

You still need a way to deliver inserts and coupons. That has not been solved, yet.

 

Here's to hoping Newhouse doesn't bring the three-day a week practice to other parts of the country or else I'm screwed.

I know some papers (not Newhouse) that skip the Saturday edition and have a few extra pages in the Sunday edition to help get in the extra news.

Delivering inserts and coupons can be done easily via PDF.