Small Dailies Doing Just Fine

While big newspapers struggle to staunch the flow of subscribers from print to online news sources and to increase readership, most small daily newspapers are doing just fine.

The vast majority of the U.S.’s daily newspapers are small papers, and for many of them, circulation is going up and advertising remains strong, writes Media Life.
The Daily Republic in Mitchell, South Dakota, for example, has seen circulation rise 0.5 percent and 1.5 percent annually in the last two years, and claims about 32,000 readers in 17 counties. Other small papers are reporting similar gains, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Some of those are growing thanks to population booms in their markets.
According to one industry estimate, 75 to 80 percent of American newspapers are smaller papers that are maintaining circulation or reporting small gains.

The Newspaper Association of America’s vp of small-market newspapers, Bob Scaife, says that local content is what makes small papers different from their big-city counterparts. A report released in 2000 by the Readership Institute showed that readers are interested in “hyper-local” news, or stories about local traffic accidents and reports of children’s soccer games.

National advertisers find it difficult to reach local markets via small newspapers because of the time and effort involved in actually purchasing the ads. Consortiums such as one between Yahoo and nearly 200 newspapers for content/ad sharing, or between McClatchy, Gannett and Tribune, have been formed to help make local purchasing easier on newspaper websites, and Google has launched a print advertising program to sell newspaper ads in major newspapers - but none of these offer a comprehensive strategy for purchasing ad space in small local papers.