by Joel Thurtell
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Heard about a business model for newspapers.
Goes like this: Write news, sell ads, print a paper and hawk it, mail it, put it in vending machines, newsstands and let people decide if they want to buy it.
In small towns where I know the newspaper proprietors or where I visit often enough to be familiar with local newspapers, it works.
I’ve seen this formula at work in western Michigan at Lowell, Berrien Springs, Marcellus, Decatur. In northern Ontario, I’ve seen it at work in the Manitoulin Expositor.
I know this will sound revolutionary and come as a shock to people who’ve been reading dire predictions about the imminent demise of newspapers, mostly published in big daily newspapers on the verge of failing.
Here’s what the small fry do: Once a week, they gather all the news they’ve had time to write up, and they take all the advertisements they’ve been able to sell and they print them on paper.
Next, they deliver these vehicles, which they call “newspapers,” to customers. Some are mailed, some are set out in vending machines, some are laid out on tables in book stores or news stands, some are actually brought to customers’ homes.
Ramona Moormann edits the Marcellus News and her son, David Moormann, runs the Decatur Republican. Those papers don’t employ ad sales representatives, yet people place enough ads to keep the presses rolling.
Oh yes, they have a website, typical of smalltown papers — just enough to identify them and show you how to subscribe or place an ad.
No news on those Internet sites.
Ditto at the Berrien Springs Journal Era: Want to read about the Eau Claire or Berrien Springs marching bands? Better pick up a copy of the Journal Era. You won’t find news online.
Francie VanderMolen, operations manager at the Journal Era, tells me that paper has no ad salesperson, either. Yet the paper sells enough ads to support its small staff, which includes part-time stringers, or news correspondents. They are in no trouble.
I read the Ledger in my hometown of Lowell, Michigan. I worked at that paper summer of ’61, casting and mounting ads from lead in the back shop. They don’t smelt lead any more, but the basic business model hasn’t changed.
Want to know what’s happeing in Lowell? Better find a copy — a PAPER copy — of the Ledger.
I’ve been reading the Manitoulin Expositor since the early 1970s, when I started visiting Georgian Bay on vacation. A healthy and well-written paper has only gotten better, even in these supposedly down times.
The writing is first-rate, and the paper is fat, fat, fat. And it has vibrant rivals in other parts of the island and nearby mainland towns.
It is not all doom and gloom for newspapers.
The hard luck yarns come from the big papers, and they are, no doubt about it, hurting.
And it is the big papers whose wheels squawk the most. Myopic and narcissistic, the big papers don’t think to look at the host of small papers in small towns where the news comes out once a week in paper form just as it did when some of these newspapers were founded in the 1800s.
I don’t pretend to be a seer, but this is what I hope will happen: The big papers will die their miserable, suicidal deaths and once gone, their demise will clear the way for small newspapers to start up.
There will always be news.
There will always be people who want to read the news.
There will always be people who want to sell things or otherwise let people know their business. And there will always be people who want to buy things and who need that clearinghouse known as a “newspaper.”
I know, I know. Many now see life only in the Internet. I’m told I’m a dinosaur, that eventually those small papers will succomb and put their news and ads online. They will have no choice, I’m told.
The choice would be theirs, but they’d be fools to abandon a model that’s been working for centuries.
Beware of the Internet, you small town editors and publishers.
Use it, if need be, to enhance your stature.
Refrain from giving news or ads away for free.
Keep those print papers coming and bide your time.
When the big guys collapse, finally, from the weight of their own nonsense, small papers will find bigger markets for their old-fashioned wares.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
Though it’s not a daily, we have a small newspaper success story right here in Metro Detroit.
Since a Save the Eccentric campaign began six months ago in May, that Birmingham paper has signed up about 2,500 new subscribers and increased advertising.
As a Nov. 1 editorial says: “We have torn the paper apart and rebuilt it, turning back to the original intent of George Mitchell and Almeron Whitehead, who founded the Eccentric in 1878, and we have made it once again a truly local newspaper. ”
Time magazine blogger Karen Dybis, part of the Assignment Detroit crew, said this last week about Eccentric supporters:
“Maybe they’re old-fashioned; they like receiving a paper with local stories in it. Maybe they’re stubborn and don’t want the economy to ruin yet another area business. Maybe they wanted to prove that David can still take on Goliath, even in this modern age.”
So yes, indeed: “Old-fashioned wares” can survive with “a model that’s been working for centuries.”
Read more: http://detroit.blogs.time.com/2009/11/09/read-all-about-it-people-save-paper/#ixzz0X2tvPbRG
Wow! This is better than seeing our names up in lights. Thanks for the encouraging words.
Great blog, Joel, and right on the money. I always thought when newspapers put their content online it was like committing suicide. Who would go to the trouble and expense of buying a paper when they can read it online for nothing?
Your points about the small town papers and the service they provide make sense, too. They are as necessary as the town criers used to be, but they’re more than that. They’re the glue that holds the community together. They’re the one constant, the bulletin board, the voice of the neighborhood.
They’re also mainly weeklies now, and that cuts down on news overkill. People look forward to a once-a-week sit down with their newspaper, and the papers don’t have to depend on news services to fill space.
Nice to hear about the Eccentric doing well, too. I used to write a column and occasional features for the Observer-Eccentric papers and back then (don’t know about now) I felt they were about as local and interesting as a suburban paper could be. They didn’t try to compete with the Detroit dailies, but concentrated instead on the communities they served.