The word on the street for many years has been that the newspaper industry is dead. A steady stream of news stories has indicated newspapers are struggling, causing many of them to close or lay off people.
Those stories have always baffled the staff at The Gazette, because we haven’t had to close shop or lay off staff – and in fact we moved to a better location last year in an effort to become a bigger presence in the community. And in talking with others at weekly newspapers throughout the state, most of them are doing well, with some even thriving.
So reading an editorial titled “Where newspapers thrive” by Judy Muller in the Sept. 13, 2011, issue of the Los Angeles Times was particularly pleasing, because it confirmed what many of us already knew: “At a time when doomsayers are predicting the death of traditional journalism, thousands of small-town weeklies are doing just fine, thank you.”
She said the U.S. has 8,000 weekly papers, and their success is not being measured in conversations about the newspaper industry. Instead, the woes of big corporate daily newspapers are dominating the conversation because their profits keep declining and they haven’t figured out how to cope with a changing economy and what they claim is the changing attitudes of newspaper readers.
In reality, this attitude has remained the same over more than 200 years of newspaper readership: namely that people want to read about what affects them. At The Gazette, we concentrate on anything local, because if it’s local, there’s a good chance it’s going to affect the reader. This includes local government, local events, local obituaries, local sports, local features and local people.
Muller agrees with this assessment. “It’s more than a little ironic that small-town papers have been thriving by practicing what the mainstream media are now preaching,” she writes. “‘Hyper-localism,’ ‘citizen journalism,’ ‘advocacy journalism’ – these are some of the latest buzzwords of the profession. But the concepts, without the fancy names, have been around for ages in small-town newspapers.”
To prove her point, she cites some statistics from a National Newspaper Association survey that said more than three-quarters of respondents said they read most or all of a local newspaper every week, and a full 94 percent said they paid for their papers.
Based on feedback we receive from readers, we know they are looking at everything, including the crossword puzzle on the classified page, as some have said it’s too difficult.
And we’ll continue to focus on local news. I’ve said many times before our biggest problem is finding enough room for the content we do have. Because our page numbers are based on the amount of ads we sell each week, we often have to hold news items until later weeks. For most of the summer, I’ve had to hold “College Capsules,” because other items have taken more precedence.
Having said that, again I’ll reiterate the more ads people purchase, the more local news we can print. And judging by this confirmation that readers love their weekly newspapers, advertisers should be inclined to purchase space to promote their products and services because more than likely readers will notice it, unlike some other sources they may purchase advertising from.
Muller also mentions weekly newspapers are less inclined to put content on the Internet because they know it makes readers less likely to purchase a paper. Take a look at our website. We don’t put much on it, because we know this to be true.
Just as we already knew the newspaper industry wasn’t dying.
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Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Sept. 16, 2011.
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