Jumping to the Wrong Conclusion

New York Times media columnist David Carr, who is staking out a position as a staunch defender of the primacy of the traditional newspaper, has come up with a doozy: a small weekly community newspaper in New Jersey that claims to be thriving. In fact, Carr says, The TriCityNews of Monmouth County "is prospering precisely because it aggressively ignores the Web."

Well, not precisely. In fact, probably not much at all.

The TriCityNews' owner and publisher, Dan Jacobson, is proud of his print-only stance, Carr reports. "Why would I put anything on the Web?" Carr quotes Jacobson as saying. "I don't understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper."

Carr and Jacobson have jumped to the wrong conclusion about what makes the TriCityNews a success. Indeed, many small community papers, with and without Web sites, are doing just fine, and will continue to do so even as larger newspapers founder. 

That has nothing to do with print, or the Web. It has everything to do with the fact that these little papers cover their communities closely–and have little or no competition in doing so. Web or not, their readers have almost no place else to go.

The well-publicized storm that's roiling the newspaper business isn't really affecting many of these smaller players. When we talk about newspapers in trouble these days, we're primarily talking about metro dailies, which are being pummeled on all sides by competition from national news sites, bloggers, craigslist, hyperlocal sites, Yelp, and others. There are generally myriad other ways to get most of what's in most dailies. Want international news? It's everywhere. National news? Ditto. Sports? Ditto, plus ESPN. Entertainment news? Same thing. 

The one franchise the big metros can still defend, usually, is local news–and even there, they're probably spread too thin. In fact, they're spread so thin that they're often undercut by small community papers like ... the TriCityNews, which covers news and arts in the area around Asbury Park like the dew, as the saying used to go.

In fact, the TriCityNews has staked out an even narrower niche, as an alternative community weekly with an edge. (Its almost non-existent Web site shows a copy of the paper sitting atop a toilet.) So it's a little offbeat, and doubtless a nice alternative to Gannett's Asbury Park Press, its nearest daily competitor. And the Asbury Park Press is no slouch at local coverage itself.

That unique local angle is what makes the TriCityNews a success, whether or not it has a Web site. (Ironically, because its alternative audience probably skews young, it may actually be limiting itself by not reaching that audience online.) Indeed, it's tiny (10,000 circulation), keeps its editorial costs low, offers affordable advertising and has annual revenue that's probably a rounding error for a paper like the Asbury Park Press. Comparing its situation to the problems of big dailies is really apples and oranges.

Long after metro dailies wither away, small community and alternative papers like the TriCityNews are likely to continue in print (and on the Web), because they're providing unique, focused content to their narrowly defined audiences (and advertisers). If there was a way to get the same stuff from an online (or print) competitor, these papers would face a lot of the same structural pressures as their larger cousins. And they're still feeling the same pinch from a lousy advertising economy, nonetheless. But their success really doesn't have anything to do with whether they're distributed in pixels or dead trees. It's the nature of their content that makes the difference. 

So contrary to what Carr and Jacobson believe, the secret to the TriCityNews' success probably isn't that it fiercely eschews the Web. It's that it's fiercely local.

Comments

[carl]

you are exactly right.

In April 2006, I established an internet only news site for Sedona, Arizona at www.Sedona.biz. I did this because the town's flagship paper, The Sedona Red Rock News, had a pitiful presence on the internet. I concluded, I believe correctly, that they didn't want to develop a web presence for fear of cannibalizing their print edition. This opened the door for a competitor to step in.

As it so happens, Sedona.biz now receives over 20,000 uniques per month; and the town has a population of 12,000. However, 3 million visitors come to Sedona each year. The local paper, therefore, is missing a huge component of those who look for Sedona on the internet.

The cost to operate Sedona.biz is quite low, and the local paper, eventhough they own their own printer, still has to print and deliver them. And, btw, they only publish on Tues & Fri, making our daily news site extremely competitive.

You can ignore the web, if you wish, but it just leaves the door open for competitors to step in. Maybe I'll take a look at Monmouth......seems like there's an opportunity there.

[Jay Rosen]

Mark: I would love a Potts post on this idea, and what's wrong--or, heck, what's right--with it.

http://is.gd/cQRk

Former New York Times reporter, now a professor at Stanford University, says newspapers should push for an anti-trust exemption that would allow them to collude on price and begin charging for news on the Net.

One of my commenters on Twitter said it would have to be a RICO exemption, and the cartel would have to force everyone to charge. Me, I think it's a bizarre solution, but not everyone does.

Potts post?

[Marc Matteo]

Yeah, I wonder how many web entrepreneurs will start looking at Monmouth County as a great place to start up a fledgling news web site and burst Jacobson's little insulated bubble. They'd have no online competition after all.

I too live in an area where the local semi-weekly has all but eschewed the web and I keep thinking that it presents a ripe opportunity.

[John Duncan]

Mark: You're right about a lot of this. Except that doing nothing and waiting is a legitimate tactic that would have served even those Metro papers well. What good has being online done for most of those titles, never mind the much smaller ones? Would they be better off entering the online era now with a pile of reserved cash rather than having to unpick a 1998 website that has drained them of capital for 10 years?

Anyway, very nice post and if anyone is interested the expanded version of this argument is at http://blog.inksniffer.com/2008/12/22/off-the-web-and-in-the-black-why-doing-nothing-is-sometimes-the-perfect-tactic.aspx

john duncan
inksniffer

[not so fast....]

Not so fast, gentleman. To call Tri-City a community paper is an error and doesn't do justice to community papers like the 2 River Times and The Hub which truly "cover" the community.
Mr. Jacobsons version of community coverage is to borrow stories from these papers, slam the local daily paper and other weeklies, and launch personal attacks on it s reviewer when there is a negative article about one of his advertisers.
He doesn't cover meetings, thereby relying on second hand accounts of what went on in the "tri-city" towns and tends to beat the same old dead horse topics which are the only ones that he is familiar with. He's never met an advertiser or developer he didn't want to shill for.
Tri-City wishes it was the NY Press or Village Voice, in reality it is a freebee, that one finds stacked on top of the trash can in the local pizzeria (how fitting). It keeps the circulation costs low, however!
To call it a newspaper, whether it makes money or not, sullies the name of legitimate papers everywhere

[Mark Howers]

John,

you obviously have a bone to pick with the TriCity News. I however am a big fan. It's the only weekly in Monmouth County (actually in all of NJ) that tells it like it is. Some people can't handle that I guess. Plus its funny as shit which goes a long way with me. I look at it as more of an entertainment piece than a newspaper, like the Howard Stern show, in the sense that, love it or hate it, EVERYONE reads it. And covering town meetings is boring, anyway. Who wants to read that crap. That is what the TRT and Hub are for and is probably why both are severely hurting. BECAUSE THEY'RE BORING!!!!

[Rocky]

This is a lesson I learned in the early, early days online. (Back before the Web really existed.) Small communities will be active and passionate about tools that serve their needs.

When I was at The Daily Northwestern, some joker signed up the newspaper's email account (which I monitored) for a listserv on bagpipes. This listserv got dozens and dozens of messages a day even in the early 90s. Why? Because people who wanted to talk about bagpipes had limited outlets in which to do that.

When I later went to work for the Star Tribune, most of our rather generic talk boards got very little traffic... b/c those topics you could talk to people about at the bar, hair salon, etc.

[joemomma]

Check out Dan Jacobson's radio interview with CBS radio here: http://www.wcbs880.com/pages/podcast/91.rss

Just scroll downt o about the middle of the page. Very interesting and gives you some good insight into the paper's success. Most interesting comment from Jacobson in the interview is that triCity's content, first and foremost, is why the paper has had such success.

[sloane]

It would be interesting to hear if there are other newspapers out there following just one of these two strategies (no content on the web; something similar in content, tone and voice) in order to be able to better parse out to which of these two the paper's success might be most attributable to.

I first read about TriCityNews on the Marketing Doctor's blog, which referenced the the NY Times article ( http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/business/media/22carr.html?partner=rss&emc=rss ) on the paper's success but didn't mention the unique format.

Interestingly enough, though, the Marketing Doctor (John Tantillo) also attributed the paper's success to its focus on its (local) target market. http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/2008/12/30/new-jersey-newspaper-bucks-the-trend-and-wins.aspx