The First Shall Be Last

It seems that the Good Book is right about the meek inheriting the earth, or at least the U.S. publication business. Consider:

• Big-city dailies are closing or going into bankruptcy, while small-town papers thrive because they were doing "hyper-local" long before it was cool.
  
• Publishing Group of America has grown rapidly by placing its magazines (such as American Profile) into weekly papers rather than duking it out with Parade and USA Weekend and the defunct Life for big-city dailies.
  
• Major magazines are shutting down while niche titles spring up.

And look at the newsweeklies. A few years ago, the pundits talked about the battle between the two giants owned by Fortune 500 companies, Time and Newsweek, and wondered when they would drive smaller, independent U.S. News & World Report out of business.

The Economist was too much of a niche product to be considered, and The Week wasn't taken seriously because it did no original reporting and merely compiled and rewrote what had already been published. Now the two little (by circulation) British imports are prospering and actually growing circulation.

U.S. News has turned its weakness into a strength, abandoning the weekly business altogether, creating rankings for everything that moves (the latest is nursing homes), and launching digital and Web products left and right.

And what of the Big Two? They have shrunk to a shadow of their former selves in both ratebase and page count and can’t seem to figure out the Web.

Time can't scoff at The Week any more, not after it caught heat for picking up a poorly researched blog item that allegedly listed the 10 most endangered U.S. newspapers. At least The Week avoids opinion pieces masquerading as journalism.

Now we hear that Newsweek has decided to slash its ratebase, pattern its magazine after The Economist (You know, like requiring people to pay actual money for a subscription.), and copy the Web strategy of U.S. News.

The 21^st Century will not be kind to mass media. It’s no longer enough to create good content, as Time and Newsweek still do. You have to provide people something they really want and can’t get anywhere else.

Small Weeklies Not So Weak

In this season of “still printing is the new up,” can there really be a part of the ink-on-paper publishing business that is actually growing? Yes, small weekly newspapers are apparently experiencing healthy circulation growth.

The number of “in-county” Periodicals pieces mailed from October 2007 to September 2008 increased 12.8% over the previous 12-month period, says a Postal Regulatory Commission report released this week, while their weight was up 8.4%. Even the July-September period was strong despite the weakening economy – up 11.8% in pieces and 7.4% in weight.

By contrast, other Periodicals (“Outside County”) were down for the fiscal year, 3.5% in number of pieces and 6.6% by weight. Standard flats, the sub-category dominated by catalogs, probably declined even more, but the statistics do not clearly delineate those flats from other kinds of Standard mail, such as letters.

In-county periodicals receive preferential rates in comparison with their nationally distributed cousins. Postal regulations require that they have at least half their circulation within their county of publication and have total paid or requested circulation of less than 10,000. They are typically non-daily newspapers serving small towns or suburbs.

Some of the increases may be from postal-classification changes rather than from actual growth in such publications. The big rate increases of 2007 may have spurred publishers to shift Standard-class publications to the cheaper Periodicals class or to drop enough out-of-town circulation so that they could claim in-county status. It may also indicate a shift toward greater reliance on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver such papers, especially in response to spiking gasoline prices.

Still, local coverage seems to be the last bastion of ink-on-paper news coverage, especially in small towns. The Web has done little to replace small-town newspapers, and broadcast journalism (pardon the oxymoron) has never been up to the job.

So are we going to see members of the recently formed American Society of Shit-canned Media Elites abandoning Manhattan to run weekly papers in places Bug Tussle, Arkansas and East Marrycousin, West Virginia? Yeah, just as soon as they're done with the big George W. Bush Fan Club dinner.