Metro Papers Are to Community Dailies What the Cineplex is to the Roxy

For those of us who love movie and the news, great little piece by Patricia Leigh Brown in the New York Times this week about how small-town theaters are flourishing across the villages of America. The Roxy in Langdon, North Dakota, the Alamo in Bucksport, Me., the Luna in Clayton, N.M., and the Strand in Old Forge, N.Y. People are going, buying popcorn, hanging out, no matter how mundane the cinematic choices.

Which got me thinking about the growing gulf between the metros and the small-town press. I heard it in talking with smaller town publishers at this year’s New York Press Association. We’ve seen in the increasing circulation disparities between large and small. Most of the paid content experiments are happening at smaller papers.

We know there’s something here, and the movie theater metaphor helps explain it. Community is a constant and one that doesn’t scale well, above some thousands of people. Community sites from Mark Potts’ Backfence to Tim Armstrong’s Patch seem to focus on communities of 30,000 to 60,000. And even smaller is better, if harder to make work financially for publishers.

Just like people will go to the Roxy no matter what’s playing — “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”! — people will read the local press even if it isn’t Pulitzer-quality journalism. Show “Alvin” on a cross-country American Airlines flight, to which I was recently subjected, and you get groans from the crowd. Show it at the Roxy, and people just feel better about it.

The small town press, online and off, looks to have a far different trajectory than the metros. Re-creating the Roxy, in news, may be as good a guideline as any to chart the future.

1. 

   w3 says:

   July 14, 2010 at 8:09 pm

   What’s more likely: That readers stick with their small-town daily paper out of stubborn loyalty to the masthead, or because that the small-town paper is the best place to get news that readers care about?

   There’s something to consider when looking at the small market papers – most are unopposed in their markets. In other words, their content isn’t available anywhere else. Exclusivity is almost a dirty word for most media execs, because content costs money. But every time a media exec talks about “clusters” and “synergy” he’s giving the Internet a shot in the arm. Diluting the value of your product is great for reducing costs and maximizing efficiencies, unfortunately it’s also giving readers yet another reason to spend their attention elsewhere.

   If you can’t control how readers get your content, how can you control your revenue? You can’t. The easy solution is to address the one thing managers CAN control, costs. Unfortunately, cutting costs doesn’t address the underlying problem.

   Own your content, and ensure that it has value. The rest will take care of itself. But shareholder obligations being what they are, I expect we’ll see another round of layoffs instead. Maybe after the industry has given up enough territory, Yahoo and AOL will hire enough journalists to revive the industry right out from under the newspaper execs.