Newspapers should get smaller to get better
Newspaper staffs are shrinking and niche Web sites are popping up all over the place.
Newspapers and staffs should get physically smaller and only cover what is in their niches. Some papers have technology sections, movie review sections, health sections, etc. Those are all non-local niches.
A newspaper will get killed trying to compete in that space. Why would I want want to read tech news in a newspaper when I can get better and more current news from sources like Engadget and CNET? I knew about Apple’s iPhone SDK announcement while it was happening. Why would I want to read about it the next day? (Hint: I don’t.)
Why should I care what a local movie reviewer has to say when there are niche sites like Movies.com that provide much more in depth coverage and useful features like movie times and upcoming release dates?
Mens Health/Womens Health are both way better than any health and fitness section I have ever seen in a newspaper. If you’re not ESPN or Sports Illustrated, you should probably not be covering national sports. I know I’m not reading it.
But there are things that Mens Health, ESPN, Movies.com, etc can’t do that a local newspaper can do: namely cover a local community. Many people call it hyper local, but I think hyper local is where our focus should have been all along. Local is why people buy the local paper.
I know of a sports editor for a weekly newspaper that uses his sports column to write about national sports issues. There are countless columnists and talking heads who do a much better job. People aren’t reading the local people to read his thoughts on national sports, especially since he doesn’t even cover or travel to national sporting events.
I know of a small daily newspaper that asked a copy editor to review cell phones for a one-time feature. Not only is she not a technology writer, but she is also not a writer in general. If someone wants to know about cell phones they’ll go to one of the many strong technology Web sites and blogs (by people who cover technology for a living).
This is why newspapers should get smaller. Getting smaller will make them more focused. I don’t just mean cutting a few pages here or there or trimming the width of the paper. I mean cutting out whole sections and positions that make no sense for a local publication.
The Web is the home of the niche audience. The only niche that a newspaper has is its local market. Stick to it.
Many newspapers have been shrinking in recent years, yet they are still trying to cover as many beats and put out similar levels of copy. Does anyone honestly believe that writers and copy editors will magically be able to turn out the same quality of work while doing much more of it each day? No one with a brain does, and this is why newspapers are constantly printing mistakes and running embarrassing corrections.
Quality will trump quantity any day of the week. And maybe what we know as a local newspaper will have to change drastically. Maybe we’ll need to completely blow up how we cover news in order to cover it better.
I’m fine with that because what newspapers have been doing hasn’t been working.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:52 am
[...] Newspapers should be smaller to get better. The Journalism Iconoclast has some thoughts about what newspapers need to do. He makes sense but the concept is likely not to go down too well with those whose definition of what a newspaper is hasn’t changed. [...]
March 7th, 2008 at 6:18 am
So what does this mean for general national newspapers? Left behind it seems…
March 7th, 2008 at 11:12 am
> Why would I want to read about it the next day? (Hint: I don’t.)
Actually, I think print newspapers need to focus more on providing that in-depth analysis. This would give readers an incentive to read about events such as the iPhone SDK the day after.
@John…
National papers have a huge role in online news. Not only do they have a great brand — nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com, usatoday.com — they also have the infrastructure to manage it. Can’t say that about any startup!
March 7th, 2008 at 11:28 am
@Patrick - I agree with you on in-depth analysis pieces. I believe that’s what newspapers should be doing right now in their print editions. Save the current news for the Web edition and concentrate on giving readers meaningful second-day content.
I’ve argued that point before. Maybe I should have made this post a little more clear. I just don’t want to see news in a print edition that Apple released an iPhone SDK yesterday. I knew they were releasing it yesterday for about a month, and I followed it live. What a newspaper can give me is analysis to what this means for the iPhone, the mobile market and for users.
The iFund, to me, is the bigger story. Are devices like the iPhone really going to be bigger than the PC? Are we about to user in an era of having a PC in everyone’s pocket? $100,000,000 in a venture capital fund is huge for what many people thought was “just another gadget.”
@John and @Patrick - I think national newspapers still have a role to play, if they are willing to play it. They too need to get leaner and more focused, but brands like the Post and Times can be major national players. Brand identity is very difficult to create, and they have it in spades. They are in many ways the ESPN and SIs of national and international news.
Does it make sense for the Times to try to compete with CNET on tech news? I don’t know. Without David Pogue they would have nothing, but they have him, which keeps them competitive.
But I think the important point here is that most papers are not the Times or the Post (I’m looking at you LA Times). Just because you are a big paper doesn’t mean you have a big national reach.
March 9th, 2008 at 12:58 am
>I knew about Apple’s iPhone SDK announcement while it was happening. Why would I want to >read about it the next day? (Hint: I don’t.)
News flash: You didn’t.
We blogged it during the day, and wrote about it in-depth in print. Not for the first time, either. This kind of continuous coverage is something we and a lot of news organizations are doing quite a lot of these days. We’re not afraid to break news online, or even in our blogs.
Really, you should check it out. Things have changed quite a bit in the last few years.
The other major problem with your post is your assumption that because you aren’t getting anything out of our coverage then no one is. Hate to break it to you, but not everyone is as breathlessly excited about the iPhone SDK as you are (or I am). And those people who are interested in technology, but aren’t likely to run out and buy a book on Objective-c and Xcode are the folks who look to us.
We aren’t trying to out-CNET CNET because our audience *would* tune out if we did that. People (quite a large number of them, in fact) turn to the Times for a certain kind of tech coverage. And this is something we do quite well, and I see no reason we should stop doing it well.
That is our niche, Pat.
March 9th, 2008 at 3:16 am
Good advice for PR practitioners, as well. When I was in PR, we spent way too much time trying to get local papers to latch onto our “national” “trends.”
June 12th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
[...] still operate like there aren’t strong niche competitors. This is what I mean when I say that newspapers could get better by getting smaller. Dump all of those sections that niche outlets do better (get rid of all those obsolete critics for [...]