My last line, which I know sort of undermines my point was more of a joke than anything else. The point though is that we are staving off the barbarian hordes by doing what we are supposed to do. Craigslist won’t show up here because the market is completely locked down. It is in big cities around the corner, but you place a free listing in our classifieds and they sell.

I think I also spent too much time talking about my position and less talking about the position of community papers in general.

I’ve been recruited a lot recently by small community papers and from what I’ve seen my position here is not that different from most small markets.

Newspapers are still king in small town America, and I think that the main reason for this is that intelligent journalists (yourself and my wife, and Silliman included) are not as interested in covering the local soccer game, and more interested in stories that matter.

I believe that the national papers, the venue in which these stories that matter have previously been published will go away to be replaced with another sort of media.

However, I haven’t seen anything that compared to a newspaper in the local market.

We do have a weather page, stock page, etc. and we have them because we always have in some cases.

We have a successful model and as of yet it makes a ton of money and circulation grows (when I say we I am talking about small town newspapers). When large shopping centers open in my neck of the woods they take out ads in the local media, and it would not be cost effective for a website, or even advo to break into this market.

There is a great article I just read about Google being like a predatory bird that jumps into unwatched nests to eat the other bird’s lunches.

I think that’s very true.

The difference is that national newspapers have operated on a mostly losing model for the last 10 years and watched while their competition waited and took small steps. Now look at them.

We are operating on a profitable model and also trying new things (our website is at a half milling a year this year up from 40k last year) but the point is that the ground work is laid in local markets and it wouldn’t make monetary sense for someone else to come in right now.

They wouldn’t have an easy lunch, rather a bloody fight where they would have to eat a loss for a long time before they turned a profit.

That’s why I’m so entrenched in local markets. I see them as having their monopolies for a long time, and unless we really screw up, I don’t see them going anywhere.

Alright, off to work.

-Peace

The most important part of your comment is the last line: “My monopoly isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet.” Don’t worry, it will. There are thousands and thousands of really smart people with lots of money trying to figure out how to access local, small-scale ad markets like yours with more effective online advertising products, and your comment just illustrates my point: That when competition and disruptive technology DOES finally come along, newspapers are horribly ill-prepared to deal with it and just get beat to death.

That said, hey! Maybe online competition will never make it to whatever corner of the market you currently occupy. And whatever happens, local news providers are best positioned to put up a good fight.

But it doesn’t sound to me like you guys have much of a plan for what to do if the barbarian hordes (or hell, just Craigslist) do show up.

For those interested I can share with you an article from the latest Ad Age stating that newspapers in general make about a 30% profit margin. I work for a local paper right now with a circulation of just under 20K. Even in this economy we gross anywhere from 2-3 million a month.

That’s normal for small papers.

The big papers have chosen incorrectly, they’ve bet on national news when local news would have been a better choice, but the point is that even the New York Times still makes about 7-8% profit, and when you are talking about that kind of revenue you don’t just “go away” or even transition to something else very easily.

The small towns that I see with the press associations are still completely ruled by the paper and in my market (which as I’ve said is not different from other small towns, check most smaller towns in the midwest and south) we have 88% of all the households in the region getting our product.

People are hungry for what we publish, and when we took out the stock page to save some bucks we were almost run out of town, trying to cancel the TV book also garnered about 900 phone calls and 30 cancellations.

The National news is full of terrible stories about the newspaper industry as is the idea that ad revenue is “disappearing” the fact of the matter is that we are in a recession and ad revenue is not disappearing from print any faster than it is anywhere else.

We still have the lion share of ad revenue in any market (show me a website that nets 1 million a month in a small market) and we still have the lion share of readers.

The circulation of local papers has steadily climbed too about 3% or so every year.

Again, I’m not saying that the group of six papers where I manage the revenue is hitting all the numbers, I’m saying we are holding our own and that is indicative of most small papers in the nation.

Newspapers are still the most profitable, and until you can figure out a way to get people to respond to online ads in the same way they do to print ads, and care about getting their local news, pictures etc. online, newspapers are here to stay.

There is not a website I’ve found which sells ads to local businesses and can deliver the same sort of results that print does.

My monopoly isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet.

1. Newspaper bureaucracy have consistently mistaken trustworthiness for stodginess and boredom.

2. Newspapers could have learned a lesson from the New Journalists, and realized that the form of newspaper writing was flexible and could be interesting. But they missed it.

3. Newspapers responses to problems, from Jayson Blair to disappearing ad revenue, has been as bad as the problems themselves.