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Local Coverage
and in suburban Arlington. Before
long a 40 percent advertising revenue
increase followed. Wes Turner,
the Star Telegram’s publisher, told
me the key was providing a sevenday-a-week,
current news report in
zoned sections of the paper that was
professionally produced. 2
• Another variant in making zoned
local news work editorially and
financially is provided by the independently
owned Daily Herald of
suburban Chicago and Gannett’s
Journal News in New York City’s
Westchester suburbs. Neither has
a real metro “center,” so multiple
editions put different communities
in the lead position. As might be expected,
both papers have relatively
large reporting and editing staffs
given their circulation, but there is a
payoff in household penetration and
broadening the advertising base.
These examples demonstrate that a
well-targeted, professionally produced
local focus can be an editorial and
business success, though it probably
takes skill and some luck to get the
geography right.
Keeping Business In Mind
There is one more business challenge,
little discussed externally but well
known inside metro papers, in trying
to reconcile a local-local focus with
advertiser preferences. Increasingly,
advertisers clamor for, and insist on,
being placed in the paper’s A-section.
The theory is that sports, features,
and local are only read by part of the
audience while nearly everyone at least
leafs through the front section. (Take
a look at a midweek sports section of
your favorite metro and you will see
just how little advertising is there.)
Putting more local stories on the
front, with their jumps inside this section,
addresses this challenge to some
degree. Still, that is not enough copy,
as hardened business types would put
it, “to run around the ads.” A block of
national and international news needs
to stay.
While no business model has yet
emerged to fully replace the one that
drove newspaper profits so high in
years past, experimentation with new
strategies must happen given the clear
and irreversible erosion of the old
business model. In this regard, “going
local” is not all that different, in a
business sense, from newspapers trying
to improve their online capacity on a
branded site while the business model
to support it is being constructed.
As of the end of 2007, here is my
scorecard on hyperlocal. Does its
content, for the most part, merit being
called “news” in the way journalists
have understood the word Maybe, but
often not. Will it work as a business
Maybe, but there is little encouraging
evidence yet. Meanwhile, thinning
the traditional print report, even if
financially necessary, runs risks of its
own—like losing the attention of loyal
print readers even as advertising on the
printed page is likely to provide most
of the advertising revenues well into
the next decade.
Rick Edmonds is media business
analyst at the Poynter Institute. He
is also coauthor of the chapter about
newspapers in the annual State of
the News Media yearbook, published
online by the Project for Excellence
in Journalism.
2
A lengthier story about the Fort Worth situation by Rick Edmonds can be found at
http://poynter.org/content/content_view.aspid=12287.
Stories About Me
‘Being local these days is not just being a one-way flow of information.’
By Bill Ostendorf
Newspapers are missing the
point about local news. It isn’t
about geography. It isn’t about
breadth of coverage. It isn’t even about
news. It’s about me.
That’s what has changed. Readers
want the news to be about them; to
speak to them; to address their questions
and concerns directly.
That’s what the Web has taught readers.
Broadcast news (which shamelessly
promotes itself with campaigns like
“your news source” or “we care about
you”) has also shaped what people
want from their media. Polls such as
the annual survey on media credibility
by the Pew Research Center for the
People and the Press indicate that local
and national TV news have more credibility
than their counterparts in print.
TV has become the trusted source. I
would argue that one reason is that
they know how to be about me.
Unfortunately, newspaper newsrooms
don’t get it. And here is something
else they don’t get: The biggest
changes have to take place in the print
edition, not just on the Web. Most newspaper
editors try to fix print problems
with a redesign, and right now they are
more likely to do something radical or
unusual. Unfortunately, most redesigns
are purely cosmetic and don’t address
the underlying issues.
Fixing their relationship with readers
will require new approaches to writ-
36 Nieman Reports / Winter 2007