Last Man Standing? NYT and WSJ Move on Metro Markets

It's hard to gauge the impact of New York Times and Wall Street Journal moves into metro markets. They could be simple, print retention strategies aimed, at holding on to valuable print readers — the magnets for still-lucrative print advertising — for as long as possible.

Longer-term, it could be a Last Man Standing strategy, figuring that newspaper readers may well scale back their daily reading to a single paper, as they increasingly go digital. Or, it could be toehold, for an expanded digital strategy, adding local options to their national and global products.

So far, all indications are that the simplest explanation — print retention, small amount of growth — is the driving purpose. That makes sense: 85% of the overall revenues of these companies is still tied up in print. Give the readers another reason to pay a lot of money for the print sub, and you can hold on to more of them. The regional editions — the Times in the Bay Area and Chicago and the Journal's announced one in San Francisco (and L.A. and Chicago, perhaps, as well) — also give the papers better regional ad targeting, especially in categories like finance, technology and luxury.

So far, my reading of the Times' new coverage — a couple of extra pages in the Friday and Sunday editions — is that's it not any kind of game-changer. It's good, Times-like coverage, but I doubt that a half dozen stories each of those days (though trumpeted with a Page One "local" sticker) is going to make much of a difference in a buy/don't buy, renew/let it go decision.

Of course, both papers have been in metro markets for a long time. Yet, they've been a supplemental read for newsies, people whose daily education hasn't been complete 'til they've trawled the local metro paper, the Times and/or the Journal.

By definition, that's an older crowd, an elite that has given each of the two papers a few percentage points of household penetration in the cities. The Times hasn't gotten above five percent outside its home market. For examples (from data gained earlier this year):

• Boston: 2.3% Sunday & 1.6% Daily
• Fort Myers/Naples: 2.2% Sunday & 1.5% Daily
• Hartford/New Haven: 3.0% Sunday & 1.9% Daily
• San Francisco: 2.3% Sunday & 1.6% Daily
• Washington DC: 2.2% Sunday & 1.5% Daily
• West Palm Beach: 3.2% Sunday & 2.4% Daily

Given that the Journal's print circulation is now about double the Times — 2 million to 927,000 — we'd surmise that the Journal would be two to three times those numbers. (Addendum: A couple of alert readers have noted that about 400,000 of the Journal's 2 million may be online-only subs, bringing down the print-to-print, head-to-head comparison somewhat. Worth taking into account.) That's partly because of the number of its readers and partly because the business-oriented Journal's penetration in New York should be considerably less than the Times, still in part a hometown, general interest paper for New York. The Times home market has been accounting for about 40% of its Sunday sales and about 45% of its daily sales.

So if that's today, let's look at tomorrow.

The Times and Journal aren't entering these markets in a vacuum. We've never seen such activity in local markets as we're now seeing. From public radio stations getting newly news-aggressive to Politico's big DC move to growing start-ups to metro and state investigative watchdogs to the Examiners expanding, we've never seen such ferment around local news. My sense: as metro dailies have cut staff and space, they've left their flanks open, newly emboldening would-be competitors for readers and advertisers.

In fact, the potential connections between and among new and old players — as just one example, the Times, for instance, has been having continuing talks with KQED, the strong Bay Area public radio station — are being weighed.

The key here is aggregating as much high-quality content under your own brand — Journal, Times, whoever — as cheaply as possible. In the Bay Area, the Times is adding coverage without adding full-time staff; in Chicago, it has partnered with the new, and intriguing, Chicago news coop. In general, neither the Times nor the Journal can afford to add much high-salaried staff to fuel these editions. So partnering is key, though dicey in execution, with logistics, standards, immediacy and other issues always to be worked out between editors traditonally internally focused. 

The one exception: the Journal looks like it is adding 12 reporters to a NYC edition. That makes more sense. It's in line with the Journal's head-to-head competition with the Times as it targets the Times' readers and advertisers — medium-hanging fruit for the Journal. Further, it's personal for Murdoch. Plus, it's worth sending the message of "we're hiring," as the Times cuts back another 100 people in the newsroom. Psychological warfare. 

I'm still expecting outside/in, inside/out web national/local products, maybe later in 2010. Why not a Journal or Times module or two on WBUR.org or KQED or MPR News? Why not a Bay Area module on NYTimes.com or WSJ.com. Why not more NPR modules on non-public radio sites? Toggle on, toggle off, depending on your local preferences. The target: increase time on site for both parties, as much as possible.

1. 

   Jim Schachter says:

   November 12, 2009 at 6:51 pm

   You are writing with more insight than anyone else about our experiments in zoned publishing, which I head up in the NYT newsroom. A couple of observations on this post:
   - There’s more than a “Bay Area module” on NYTimes.com. Take a look at http://nytimes.com/bayarea.
   - I’d be interested in closer analysis of the opportunities for the WSJ from covering NY vs the opportunities for the NYT from much-expanded coverage of business and technology.
2. 

   camilla says:

   November 13, 2009 at 7:17 am

   Great post. Cannot agree with you anymore that “the key here is aggregating as much high-quality content under your own brand… as cheaply as possible.”
   Just as evidenced in the blogroll section of NYT’s Bay Area page, there are some great local content being produced in these areas. Capture and feature what each brand considers to be “quality” by having someone curate what has already been aggregated and organized.
   We here at Outside.in have the platform to enable this: Outside.in for Publishers. The most economical and efficient way to get access to aggregate quality content.
3. 

   Patrick Twohy says:

   November 13, 2009 at 10:24 am

   As a news consumer in the Bay Area, both the Times’ and the WSJ’s Bay Area “local” coverage comes off to me as, well, lame.
   The Times’ most recent Bay Area print offerings:Lots of companies are making apps for iPhone. Or S.F. police get email. Yow! The one is really not news to anyone with a pulse west of, say, Ninth Ave. The other, well, yeah. That’s really interesting, except who cares?
   WSJ’s offerings have the same weird sense of what outsiders think Bay Area residents will think is news.
   These projects strike me as hubristic (is that a word?), not to mention narcisistic on the part of WSJ and NYT. Imagine the reaction of the polite folk in mid-town Manhattan if someone here in San Francisco tried to sell them news about NYC.
4. 

   MarkW says:

   November 13, 2009 at 12:41 pm

   As a native San Franciscan who now lives in Philadelphia and a Times subscriber, the depiction of the Bay Area as 9 Counties, 8 bridges and 7M people is the problem with “zoned” editions. San Francisco and the surrounding communities (like Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose) are composed of neighborhoods and diverse cultures that neither the NYT or WSJ locally covers in New York let alone the Bay Area.
   NYT may be better off including some Bay Area-related zoned pages in the IHT and distributing this in the Bay Area.
   What’s next: nytimes.com/boston…