Media Frenzy

By Rob Holbert Managing Editor

I was reading an article the other night about the coming changes in the newspaper and magazine businesses and how sooner or later newspapers like the one you’re holding in your sweaty little hand will have all gone completely online.

The writer was bemoaning the death of newspapers and the current national state of affairs in which newspapers, by and large, are losing circulation, readership and advertising revenue at an alarming rate. The writer did accurately touch on one of the main causes of such decline – a general tendency of huge conglomerates that own most newspapers to cut editorial content in order to save money – but looked at it as more of a symptom rather than the actual disease.

But most of what doesn’t seem to be working in the newspaper industry can, in my opinion, be hung on one thing – conglomerateization. Anyone who has paid attention to newspapers for the last couple of decades at least can easily see why readers would go elsewhere for their news. Increasingly, the corporate-owned newspapers offer a watered-down product that’s heavy on institutional coverage, but light on the investigative stories and features readers want.

When the pencil-pushers at the top of the food chain order cutbacks in the news department, they are basically saying the paper’s most important job is to sell advertising, not to deliver news. Readers, like most consumers, notice decreased quality and go elsewhere to find what they want. Newspapers cutting back on what they offer readers is much like a restaurant cutting back on the quality of the food they serve. Sooner or later the customers are going to try someplace else.

Of course, for so many years, most newspapers were the only game in town, and they treated their readers accordingly. They developed a news-is-what-we-say-it-is attitude and got used to 35 percent profit margins and a captive audience. The Internet has changed all that, and will continue to change it at a rapidly increasing rate.

When we started Lagniappe five years ago, we had a circulation of 5,000 papers every two weeks. Now we do four times that amount. Hey, a 400 percent increase is very nice, but it’s also easy to post eye-popping growth numbers when you start small. When we began, our number one caveat was that content is king. We would provide the content we felt was lacking locally and do so in a style we would want to read. Our thought has always been if people were dying to read the paper, eventually they’d realize everyone else is too and would come running to buy advertising.

OK, so it’s not quite that easy, but we’ve had a pretty good growth rate every year. And every year we’ve tried to improve our content, either by adding new features or trying to cover things in a different way. We’ve also remained hyper local in our coverage, keeping our eyes on things in Mobile and Baldwin Counties.

But even with this steady growth, we are looking to that day when indeed we might not be printing a hard copy of this newspaper. And frankly, even though I am a newspaper guy who likes the feel of newsprint in his hand, I wouldn’t be completely broken up to become completely electronic. Maybe I’ll be an old man by the time it happens, but I do think it will happen eventually.

For the past year and eight months, we’ve been concentrating more heavily on our Website. At first, all that meant was getting a design that was user friendly and simply reproducing the same articles that appear in the print version. This year, however, we started offering more Web-only content and breaking news. The result again showed us how important content is in attracting readers. Our newsletter e-mail list has tripled and our “hits” have ballooned to a level where we feel the Web can also be a viable advertising venue.

Since the beginning of the year, our number of hits has almost doubled to over 300,000 on an average month. Now that’s not a gigantic number in the Web world, but it’s respectable and our Web circulation is growing even faster than our print. In short, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a time in the next few years when more people read Lagniappe online than do the print version.

And that’s what’s happening all over. The New York Times now has about as many Web readers as it does people who buy the paper. I’m sure that trend isn’t just limited to the Big Apple.

One of the really interesting things to imagine is what the possibilities will be once Web publications are more financially viable. My guess is we’ll probably see a time when cities like Mobile go back to having two or three daily papers – only they’ll be online. When you don’t have to buck up for a $40 million German press, newsprint, delivery trucks and press workers, the price for starting a daily suddenly becomes a lot more manageable.

Certainly for small newspapers like Lagniappe, the Web presents not only an opportunity for another revenue stream that can help keep us afloat, but even an opportunity to publish on a more regular basis, say weekly or even more frequently. But maybe I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

But readers need not fear the future. Newspapers aren’t going away, they’re just going to change. And if the change kicks the big boys in the pants in the process, we’re all going to be better for it.

Rob Holbert is Lagniappe managing editor. Contact him at rholbert@lagniappemobile.com.

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