From ONA listserv: zoned edition failures and what's a newspaper?

From the Online News Association (ONA) listserv, comes this exchange between Steve Yelvington, a media strategist and Robin Miller a perceptive maverick tech and media smart-guy.

Steve wrote:
Rob, I'm curious about your 1980s research into zoned editions, and why
you concluded they were not a good idea for the newspaper you were
working with. Was it simply a poor zoning/content model being
considered? We have had extraordinary success with hyperlocal
journalism, but I think there's a distinct difference between that and
traditional zoning as practiced by metro newspapers.

Rob responds:
My conclusion had to do with the question, "What is a newspaper?"

There is no single answer for this. Hyperlocal news was once the domain
of tiny, independent weeklies. The little "shopper paper" ran notices
that so-and-so had graduated from Army basic training, covered high
school sports highlights, announced the grand opening of Betty's Beauty
Shoppe, and so on. This kind of neighborhood journalism is now migrating
to the WWW in many areas, although it's still alive and doing fine on
paper here in Manatee County, Fleriduh.

Then there are/were your regional niche publications that cater(ed) to
various alternative lifestyles and non-mainstream groups.

At the top of the local news chain you should have The Newspaper,
capitalized because in most of the U.S. there is only one or at least a
single dominant one. The Newspaper should not assume its readers are so
narrow that they only want to know what's going on in their own
neighborhoods, but must realize that they are interested in the entire
region.

Baltimore in the 80s was a great example. You had City Paper as a feisty
alternative weekly. If you lived in Dundalk (a suburb East of the City)
you had the Dundalk Eagle for hyperlocal news there, a whole chain of
Patuxent papers each serving other 'burbs, and a whole bunch of other
small neighborhood papers in Baltimore City plus publications aimed at
gays, downtown business owners, tourists, and other subgroups.

But you needed One Newspaper (or maybe ring) To Rule Them All. That
should have been the Baltimore Sun. It *was* the Baltimore Sun, in fact,
with a Morning Sun for the tie-wearers and an Evening Sun that was
feistier and more blue-collar than the morning version. Those editions
merged and the only serious competition (a Hearst outlet) died. That
left the Sun as The Newspaper.

As The Newspaper, the Sun had a chance to be the dominant regional
voice; the place where you learned about the most important goings-on
all over central Maryland. If you lived in Ellicott City and worked in
downtown Baltimore (not uncommon), you could turn to the Sun for news of
both places. If you lived in Owings Mills the Sun could not only give
you the major crime news for Owings Mills and next-door Pikesville, but
should have also given you the highlights of criminal activity in
Catonsville so you could call your Aunt Ethel there and ask if she was
okay, and she'd say yeah, but did you see the story about those drug
people in Essex, where our friend Susie lives?

The thing was (and still is), people don't care only about their own
neighborhoods, and have connections to many other neighborhoods and
towns and care about what goes on in them, too. After talking with over
300 people I decided that The Newspaper would do best by defining its
niche as The Region and should work to be the dominant voice for the
entire region rather than trying to chop itself into bits and pretend to
be a bunch of local papers that just happened to share a masthead and
some printing presses.

Trying to be all things to all people leads to hubris, and in the end to
a fall. Find a niche and dominate it, and (especially in a media
business) you'll probably do fine. But if you're The Newspaper and --
like the Sun -- you not only decide to pretend you're hyperlocal but
also buy up a bunch of the suburban weeklies, you end up not being
anything in particular to anyone in particular. You become bland and
gray and don't offer an intense experience. And you lose readers year
after year and commission study after study to find out why, and
management hand-wringing gets so intense that you could probably power a
fair-sized four-color press with it if you mounted Hand-Wringing Energy
Capture Devices on all the executives' desks.

But hey! You shouldn't listen to me. I have no college degrees and no
foundation funding. I'm just a potbellied schlump working in a converted
lanai home office in an off-brand Florida town. You people in the Big
Media go on doing what you're doing. It's fine with me; I don't work for
any of your companies and I don't own your stock.

Meanwhile, the online media company I work for (ticker LNUX) just
declared yet another record quarterly profit and announced plans to spin
off its proprietary software division and concentrate on its media
properties, which means I'll get more freelance budget and will possibly
add another full-time staffer or two this year. W00T!

And while local TV news people sweat over declining audiences and ad
revenue, I'll go on building my little "accidental" side business --
internetvideopromotion.com -- which I funded out of my own pocket at
first, now bootstrapping purely on generated revenue. Another W00T!

Others are doing fine, too. Maybe not "fine" in the sense that top
management gets private jets, but "fine" in the sense of earning modest
profits and building innovative media businesses. And most of them are
having fun doing it!

Having fun is, really, the most important part. Journalism is great fun
for nosy people who also like to write (or make video). There are lots
of others way to earn money. Heck, if I'd kept my limo business I'd
probably be taking in more than I do now. (Actually, I *know* I would;
my former partner is doing very well!)

As long as you enjoy the process of digging up and presenting news,
you'll find a way to support this activity one way or another. Your
bosses may not, but if you truly love the news business, *you* will. And
that's what counts, right? :)

- Robin