There are long faces all over the newspaper industry this week, as the Newspaper Association of America announced that average daily paid circulation of major newspapers declined 1.9 percent in the six months ending in March. The news players continue to wring their hands over what’s causing the exodus, but most blame fickle younger readers, who prefer to get their news through other media including the Internet.
Lost in all the bad news is an interesting statistic that emerged this week: traditional, smaller newspapers and chains that serve suburban and smaller regional markets are doing quite well, thank you. The Contra Costa Times, which serves the East Bay Area in northern California, saw circulation rise 0.4 percent. In other parts of the Bay Area, the much larger San Francisco Chronicle slipped 6.5 percent and the San Jose Mercury News fell 3.4 percent. Another chain that serves smaller population centers in the Bay Area, ANG Newspapers, rose 0.3 percent.
The continued reader support for local papers seems pretty easy to explain: it’s a niche play. Every major paper in the country covers the big national news stories, but only the local rag has a passion for what’s going on in the smaller communities. Readers have learned that they can quickly and efficiently gather national and regional news from the Internet – with the added bonus of not being restricted to one newspaper’s point of view. That doesn’t mean that the local news organizations are immune to the same pressures that the Internet has put on the major newspapers, but it does mean that the local focus will enable the smaller publishers to maintain a higher level of loyalty even as they shift to online delivery. The lesson for players in any part of the industry is the value of the targeted offering.
