America’s doomed small newspapers | Hacker News Reader

America’s doomed small newspapers

blogs.reuters.com

15 pointsrobg26 comments

I have a friend who is working for a failing newspaper. He really wants to write for a print newspaper, and is a talented journalist, but I'm not sure how it's going to work out for him in the future.

On a related note, if I were to found a newspaper, I would call it the 'muckraker'. The business model should be obvious from just that.

Why doesn't your friend start a blog? If he's good, he can pick up readers in a few years and become self-employed. Or he can think of a different model...

I think that there is a real opportunity for the people producing the actual contents as paper newspapers are going digital: journalists don't have to hop from one corporate job to the next, they can attempt to be independent. This is of course always true, but change favors the small players, so his chances are better than at any other time.

I have some friends in this person's position. Reasons they give for not wanting to set out on their own:

1. They want to write and report, not sell advertising and there's no ad network out there that can get them real money ($10-15 CPM) as opposed to "internet" money ($2-3 CPM).

2. They want to be seen and read, now. Giving up a byline in a print newspaper for a blog that will take years to ramp up is a bit daunting and intimidating.

A great example of someone doing a fine job of this is http://capitolhillsfax.com He's the authority on Illinois state politics. A good number of his posts are members only. Membership costs 365/year or $1 per day.

My soon-to-be-brother-in-law is a journalist-type; he's working for the Reader as their web guy, but he's been placing freelance pieces for years. He's got a blog at the reader and has been doing a good job with it.

Maybe an option here is to find a blogging spot under a local paper's masthead. You might be able to build up a readership in your spare time, and then take them with you (away from the paper) when you get your sea legs.

Moser? If so, your soon-to-be-brother in law is one heckuva writer. Dropping you an e-mail now...

I'll tell him you approve! =)

Why doesn't every programmer start a company? It sounds easy enough, but not everyone has the chutzpah (or talent) to start a blog that will support 1+ fulltime salaries.

You can work 20-25 hours a week at a regular job and spend the rest of your time doing your own stuff. It's a reasonably safe setup (if you don't have kids) where you don't give up much but gain a lot, esp. on a personal level. Yes, of course not everybody does that, but I think the argument that your startup (or whatever we call it) won't support you from day 1 is an empty one, if you can make some safe money on the side. I would think journalism is a trade where such a hybrid transitional phase is possible.

I would leap on a blog that was oriented towards local news. It's the big gap in on-line journalism now.

In Chicago we have the Gapers Block Mechanics blog and (for Springfield) Capital Fax. I have to believe other major metro areas have similar resources.

But you're right. I live in Oak Park, just outside Chicago, and there is zero coverage of Oak Park politics or business, and yet our politics matter a great deal to the residents (for instance, they just re-engineered the main drag in the city to suit real estate developers).

As you move out of urban and suburban areas, it seems like it gets harder and harder to make news matter. In exurban and rural areas, there's not really going to be a lot of news within the (geographic) area people care about. It's too fragmented.

For instance, the fight between the mayor two-towns-over and the county government isn't really of interest to the rest of the county most of the time. I don't care about a murder that happened 30 miles away. News generation is probably a function of population density - in less dense areas, there's not a lot going on that needs to be reported on, so to fill even 4-6 newspaper pages, you've got to cover hundreds of square miles, and so each article isn't "local" for a large percentage of the population.

Perhaps also is the fact that many newspapers are no longer newspapers but editorial-papers... maybe some are failing because nobody wants to read everybody's opinion, but is actually interested in finding some actual news.

Newspapers have always been editorial-papers. Track down articles from your local from the first quarter of the 20th century. I just commented about doing this with the Trib. There's no objectivity to be found, or even feigned detachment.

Wyman's article ends with recommendations that read like a prescription for a fun startup.

We should grab a beer sometime...Mr. Oak Park.

Or a coffee, since I'm also Mr. Office Over Monadnock Intelligentsia. =)

Any time. Contact info's in my profile.

Wyman's problems and suggestions read to me like a collection of the latest hip trends, and made me feel like he was someone who knows little about how a newspaper -- especially a small town newspaper -- works.

Which impression would have been dispelled if you had either (a) read the article or (b) figured out the Bill Wyman Google search that excludes The Stones.

Wyman's been a professional journalist since '90-ish, at The Reader, Salon (as en editor), the AJC, and a bunch of other places. Hard to miss, since every other graf in this piece is an anecdote about his career working at regional papers.

i would think that small niche newspapers are the only ones that aren't doomed

Depends on how well they're run, no?

I'm waiting for the big newspapers to start selling supplements to the smaller papers. There's no reason the Hartford Courant couldn't tack on an International and National section with the NY Times brand featured, then they could focus exclusively on local stories. Heck, force the Times and the Journal to compete for the right.

Point is: If you're local, why not go hyperlocal?

It would seem like an AP or Reuters membership/subscription would already solve most of this problem. Lots of college newspapers, including top-rated ones, do exactly this, and pay the AP fees to re-run those stories.

I'm thinking of a fully formatted and printed section. The wire stories must still be integrated into the local papers. The AP would still be needed, perhaps, but it could be filler.

I used to deliver newspapers as a tween. Most days we had sections we had to insert (Food, Science, Arts, Comics). I don't see why a National/International section needs to be any different. Then the brand for the local paper becomes everything local. You flip to the Hartford Courant section and you know it's about your hometown areas. One side benefit is the Times section could have the national advertisements while local advertisers could be almost ensured local coverage.

Link to original article: http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reaso...

I haven't read my hometown newspaper in years, but I visit their website once a week. The problem isn't the reporting, it's the site. It's awful, looks like some kids threw it together in 1997.

I think they'd be better off to just scrap the site and post the stories on an ad supported blog. Focus on what they do best.

There's like 8 grafs in this piece about that problem, using the WSJ and LA Times as examples.

Of course, the LA Times moved to a complete redesign this week, so that could have been more timely.

FWIW, the LA Times has some sharp Ruby hackers in their web department -- in fact, they just hosted the LA Ruby Users Group meeting at their building this Thursday.

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