Newspapers are the new general stores
Remember them?
The thing about general stores is that they are helpful. You can pick up a variety of things from food to bandages to clothes to live bait. But the other thing about general stores is that they don’t do anything well.
They’re helpful, but they usually aren’t someone’s favorite store, because they don’t specialize in anything. General stores like Woolworth (newspapers) died because of new, more modern titans like Wal-Mart (Google).
Google, in a sense, is a general store for information. The thing is that Google has a lot of information, just as those gigantic Wal-Marts have a lot of items for sale. A Woolworth is about the size of one department in Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart combined the general store idea with a niche — really low prices on non-dollar store goods (like say, electronics). Google has a niche too; it’s the easiest way to make sense of information and find information on the Web. There is just so much information on the Web that someone had to come along to help us sort through it.
The thing is, most newspapers don’t have a niche. Their just like Woolworth. They do a lot of things OK, sometimes even relatively well, but excel at nothing. And without a niche, they’ll be overtaken by competitors who cover those individual areas better.
The rise of mega grocery stores made the idea of having a small food section in a general store obsolete (better selection and better prices are hard to compete with). In fact, just about everything a general store like Woolworth did makes little sense today. I used to buy pet fish supplies at Woolworth when I was a kid, but now I can get a much better selection and better prices at Petsmart.
But Wal-Mart is so much more than a general store. Many Wal-Marts have full-featured grocery stores in them, along with eye doctors, dentists, pharmacies, clothing departments, electronic departments, etc. You can honestly just shop at Wal-Mart and get just about everything you need in your life.
That’s what a typical general store never could do. General stores didn’t go deep enough into any one area. That’s how newspapers have become.
Sure most dailies have local news, regional news, national news, international news, sports, business, technology, etc., but few excel in any of those areas. Think about how many newspapers still have film critics and even auto critics.
These movie/entertainment and auto sections are nowhere near the caliber of niche outlets like Movies.com or Edmunds.com (or Car and Driver magazine). With the Web, why would I want to consume inferior, cursory content? I don’t.
Many newspapers 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 movies, music, auto, etc and forget national and international news unless you’re the Post or USA Today). Niche outlets are only going to attract more of your readers anyway as time goes on.
Had general stores like Woolworth found a niche and honed in on it, maybe they’d still be around today. Instead they were left with trying to go head to head against stronger competitors who could purchases goods cheaper from suppliers (this is one of Wal-Marts secrets to success).
Newspapers can find niches to exploit. Local news and sports are big areas. Hollywood movies, cars and news from other parts of the world are not niches a typical newspaper can exploit. .
June 12th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Another area the niche model applies is biology, where we could compare newspapers to dinosaurs. Big and hungry while having their food eaten by smaller mammals.
I’d actually argue for having non-niche content as long as it’s not a drain on resources. There are still people out there who turn to newspapers to get these things, and we can’t just abandon them, lest we hasten our demise. They’ve got to go, but its not a good idea to chop wildly.
I would also argue for taking a niche and going big with it, inside or out of the paper. http://www.pharmalot.com
The only constant is change. Once you’ve found a niche, you’ve got to make sure it’s still there tomorrow.
June 12th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Ya had me until you compared Google to Wal-Mart…replace it with Yahoo or another “portal” and I agree with you 100%. Yahoo came in and took everything that a newspaper has ever done (news, classifieds, reviews, etc) and took advantage of the internet’s freakish scaling capabilities to be the bigger, better, cheaper general store.
Google came in through the side door, building the fastest/cheapest car, which could drive you to the Hershey factory faster than you could walk to your corner store for a bar of chocolate.
Wow, I love metaphors.
Newspapers, like any other struggling industries (independent bookstores, cd stores, general stores, etc) have plenty of options ahead of them. The part that they’re struggling with is there is no way for them to continue making as much money, keeping their current skills, and using the same staff. If those are the requirements for the solution they’re looking for, they’ll never find it.
Good post.
June 13th, 2008 at 12:01 am
You should check out David Sullivan’s newspaper/department store blog.
http://davisullblog.blogspot.com
June 13th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Don’t forget that some small newspapers can’t afford to get smaller. They’re primarly funded primarily by display advertising, which can’t cover 100 percent of every page. Something has to fill the gap. In a small enough paper, most local content goes on the front page and one or two inside pages. The rest of the pages are filled with regional and national copy from wire services. Without that copy, the space for advertising shrinks dramatically. That’s bad for the bottom line.
June 23rd, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Just ‘unbundle’ your traditional newspaper and re-organise. Elegantly.
Or at least that’s our theory with http://www.myfootballwriter.com - and it’s US cousins, http://www.myhockeywriter.com, http://www.mybaseballwriter.com and http://www.mybasketballwriter.com...
Before that, however, and it’s time to get the big mother off the ground, http://www.mylocalwriter.com...
June 26th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
[...] Metro newspapers don’t really excel at anything, and in the era of niche publications, does that model still make sense? The Star-Ledger has found success with a niche publication, Pharmalot. Is that the model for metros to move forward? [...]