Community Daily Pay Walls: A Tourniquet?
Good, in-depth piece by Nat Ives at AdAge on community dailies’ pay walls. Nat concludes that you can learn something from the experiences in Harlingen (TX), El Dorado (AR) and Norwalk (CT), but that’s there’s hardly a panacea here. I recently did a panel with Arkansas Democrat publisher Walter Hussman at ASNE in DC, and came away with a similar feeling.
Smaller-market dailies can take a different route than metros. So far, it’s not a route to prosperity, but one of staunching the bleeding….and waiting for a better digitally oriented business model to come along. In retrospect, given the carnage the metros have suffered, that’s not a bad strategy, it’s just a wait-and-see one that looks relatively good in 2010.
A key question for smaller community dailies: where are you going to find growth in your business? My sense is that even with a pay wall, smaller dailies’ abilities to reach out to higher-quality local bloggers, even smaller weekly newspapers, radio stations and TV broadcasters could enlarge their presence — making them a small community center — and that can give them a foundation for digital ad growth.
Finally, the article makes the point that the smaller papers receive more ad revenue from local advertisers than do metros, whose loss of national advertising (moving more quickly to competitive digital plays) has been another big negative. That national/local ad dependence further defines large market/small market difference.
In some sense, just as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, though still printed on newsprint, are no longer the same category of newspaper companies as the Philadelphia Inquirer or San Francisco Chronicle, neither is the Inquirer or the Chronicle really in the same business as the El Dorado News-Times or the Norwalk Reflector. The fact that they are all in still in newsprint no longer defines them; their size of market and audience, and their scale and uniqueness of content, does.