My first newspaper job was selling classified ads over the phone for The Valley Times in Beaverton, Oregon, the summer after my freshman year in college. I’d started writing for my college paper and was thrilled to have a job – any job – in the newspaper business, even if it meant inputting ads for garage sales and used cars at a small suburban weekly.
My second newspaper job was at another community newspaper publisher, this one a chain of Los Angeles neighborhood weeklies that seemed to specialize in grocery store ads – at least that’s how it felt to me, as one of the paste up artists putting the ads together.
Those stints gave me an appreciation for community papers, one I was happy to revisit when I reported on the health of small daily and weekly newspapers here in Oregon for a story in the February 2009 issue of Oregon Business magazine. My conclusion: although times are tough for newspapers of all sizes, small papers are in a better position to survive the current economic downturn and changes in the newspaper industry than the big metro dailies.
You can read the entire story here: The Smalltown News.
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Hi, Michelle, found you through Technorati while checking EFCA rankings! Thanks for featuring us on your blog. You are an amazing writer! Keep it up. Best wishes to you … Laurel (Chicago), the official originator of the Escape From Corporate America blog.
Excellent content here and a nice writing style too – keep up the great work!
Michelle,
How do you see the economics of large newspapers are different from smaller newspaper publisher?
Nice article, Michelle. I’ve written for a local community newspaper in Georgia for almost the last four years, and I agree that it’s been a tremendous learning experience for me so far. The newspapers (and other media outlets) that do manage to stick around in the years to come must have a local (or at least a hyper-local or even regional) focus. It’ll be interesting to see how things will turn out.
Michelle,
This post is near and dear to my heart. I grew up in LaGrande and read the Observer my whole life. I think we can learn a lesson from this article in general that we need to rethink our definition of “efficiency” and “profit.” Sometimes smaller and more direct is better than bigger and more leveraged, and a never ending pursuit of higher and higher profits can in and of itself be a destructive affair.
The lady in Burns’ comment about the yuppie owner sums it up perfectly. The people that run these papers and make the decisions are intimately involved with the people and the community they cover, and thats who they have to answer to. Not Wall Street. Its more genuine and honest in that sense.
Plus, these papers can get by with 5% profit margins and still pay the bills. If the conglomerates had that low of a margin, they would be crying bankruptcy, and asking for a bailout.
For another angle on this check out townsync.com, part of their promise is to franchise their hyperlocal site to individual communities, and specifically the people behind newspapers in those communities.
-signed post for your editor-
Michelle,
This post is near and dear to my heart. I grew up in LaGrande and read the Observer my whole life. I think we can learn a lesson from this article in general that we need to rethink our definition of “efficiency” and “profit.” Sometimes smaller and more direct is better than bigger and more leveraged, and a never ending pursuit of higher and higher profits can in and of itself be a destructive affair.
The lady in Burns’ comment about the yuppie owner sums it up perfectly. The people that run these papers and make the decisions are intimately involved with the people and the community they cover, and thats who they have to answer to. Not Wall Street. Its more genuine and honest in that sense.
Plus, these papers can get by with 5% profit margins and still pay the bills. If the conglomerates had that low of a margin, they would be crying bankruptcy, and asking for a bailout.
For another angle on this check out townsync.com, part of their promise is to franchise their hyperlocal site to individual communities, and specifically the people behind newspapers in those communities.
Sincerely,
Gabe Barber
http://www.readinglocal.com
[...] The Smalltown News – Small newspapers are in a better shape than big ones to survive the recession and changing news business, according to this story I did for Oregon Business magazine. [...]
Thanks Laurel – I appreciate the note, especially since right now WordPress.com’s analytics are broken so I have no way of telling whether visitors can click through to the blog. But based on this I know now they can and are.
Michelle Rafter
Larger newspapers had been used to operating on much larger profit margins – double digit margins weren’t unusual even just a few years ago – from display and classified advertisers who didn’t have many other options for getting their information in front of their audiences. Higher profit margins meant they had the luxury of funding a large news team. Also, many large newspapers have gone from being privately held or family run to publicly traded stocks that have to answer to public shareholders and Wall Street, which demand quarterly profits.
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.
Michelle R.