It’s Local News That Sells the Best -- Something That Local And Regional Newspapers Must Rigorously Apply to Survive

In explaining some of the many reasons for the 18% circulation drop at the Los Angeles Times over the past five years, its new editor, Dean Baquet, says, “We haven’t mastered making the paper feel like it is edited in Los Angeles” The newspaper that has long held aspirations of being recognized as a national newspaper is now going to concentrate more on its local roots, with increased local and regional stories.

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In the UK, circulation drops of 10% for each of the past two years for the Birmingham Evening Mail, putting the overall circulation under 100,000, gave cause for a radical rethink. The newspaper has gone back to its name it gave up in 1967, The Birmingham Mail, and its redesign focuses on local news. It has basically reinvented itself with a “new” name.

That means local news that only used to appear on the inside pages now is prominent on the front page. And its back to grassroots, concentrating on local areas. Local offices that had been shut for budget reasons are being reopened.

Birmingham, being the UK’s second largest city, has an extremely diverse population. To be able to be local to various communities the paper is increasing its number of daily editions from three to seven, based on geography rather than time of publication. Each edition will have a minimum of five local stories but that is sure to grow.

Back in the US, Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper group, gave a clear message on the importance of local news when editors of its 100 + newspapers held their annual meeting in late September.

David Daugherty, Gannett’s vice president/research, told the assembled editors that the key to arresting the downward circulation slide was to concentrate on what readers want most, and that is local news.

“Local coverage is important. Local/local coverage is more important. Local/local/local coverage is even more important. Covering ‘me’ and ‘my agenda’ is most important.”

Dougherty basically gave the Gannett editors their marching orders that to get lost readership back, and to ensure keeping what they now have that their newspapers must provide information that no one else can match. And that means less wire copy and more local coverage.

Daugherty actually had some new research that detailed why the newspaper circulation slide was getting worse for many newspapers, and how urgent it was for newspapers to stop the rot.

It has been known for some time that the young have basically stopped reading newspapers. But according to Dougherty that’s just part of the problem. Women between the ages of 18 and 34 are no longer frequent newspaper readers (as FTM has written in the past most newspaper editorial copy is tailored towards men whereas it is the women who hold the purse strings in many families and they are the target advertisers really want), but also men between 35 and 49 “are abandoning newspapers rapidly.”

So that really means that the most loyal newspaper readers today are those over 55, and that is a major problem – they are dying off faster than new younger readers can be added.

In Los Angeles and its surrounding counties the Times competes against 16 local daily newspapers. With such a monster as the Times in their territory those local newspapers prosper at doing what the Times cannot do – a blanket coverage of their local communities. The Times cannot really compete on a truly “local” basis but rather it can improve its regional approach.

What is strange in all this is that newspapers have really known for years that local works. For instance when this writer was a young reporter on The Daily Report, a newspaper about 50 miles (80kms) from Los Angeles with the Times as the primary competitor, it would cover the local high school sports as if it was major league. Lots of stories and pictures of the high school heroes preparing for the twice-a-week games, long stories covering the games, plenty of sidebars, etc. etc. In the Times the only coverage was one agate line giving the game result!

That local sports coverage, incidentally, got the attention of the young – aren’t they the ones who aren’t reading newspapers these days? -- who wanted to read about their friends and see their pictures, and it gave the local newspaper an edge over the monolith 50 miles down the road. Going one step further, the newspaper even hired local high school newspaper reporters at a paltry 10-cents-a-word and no travel expense account to cover the games (and yes, that is how this author first broke into professional journalism).

When this author later was a UPI salesman in Indiana in the 1980s it always amazed him at how many small local communities supported a daily newspaper and a local radio station. But read the newspaper, listen to the radio and it was obvious how they commercially prospered -- they covered mostly local news and they emphasized that news with which all the family could identify – the schools.

And the news agencies understood that, too. In the US it is the state news wires that are the bread and butter of media subscribers. If in those days the UPI Indiana wire did not have complete high school sports coverage then it would not have sold. And that comes from the guy who sold it!

Indeed, one reason why Reuters declined to buy UPI when it had the opportunity in the 1980s – and thus gave up on becoming a true competitor to the Associated Press on its own turf – was because Reuters feared it would become mired in what it called parochial coverage. And it would have been.

Ask a property salesman what the three most important criteria are for a sale and the answer will be, “location, location, location.” Ask a regional or local newspaper editor today what the three criteria are for stopping the circulation slide and getting the young, and women and the older men back to the newspaper, and they will tell you its” local, local, local.”