Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Editor & Publisher takes note: Smaller newspapers are doing well despite industry's struggles

Grim reports about the financial struggles and the uncertain future of newspapers get plenty of play in media outlets. (We mentioned one recent story in The New York Times.) Amid this doom and gloom, however, smaller and community newspapers are doing well, reports Jennifer Saba and Mark Fitzgerald of Editor & Publisher.

Their report appears in this month's issue of E&P, but the Saba discusses the "small is beautiful phenomenon" in a podcast on the magazine's Web site. She says most industry analysts focus on the top 100 daily newspapers and ignore the 8,000 non-dailies. These papers are posting double-digit profit margins and seeing big increases in advertising and circulation, things "that are unheard of for a lot of these big metros today," Baba said.

Baba points to the recent figures released by the National Newspaper Association (which we wrote about last week) that show readership went up for community newspapers in the last two years. Baba said success was not limited to community newspapers who enjoy a monopoly as the only newspaper around, but also included newspapers that compete with nearby metro papers. She concluded that the local focus of community newspapers remains invaluable to readers and to the papers' bottom lines. (Read more)

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