>From Recovering Journalist: "Jumping to the Wrong Conclusion" (a professional POV) & a Comment following it (Somewhat testy - lol): http://tinyurl.com/77zc3h
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: 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. **************One site keeps you connected to all your email: AOL Mail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. Try it now. (http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp&icid=aolcom40vanity&ncid=emlcntaolcom00000025) [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AsburyPark/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AsburyPark/join (Yahoo! 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