Newspaper business

A coworker handed me a copy of a magazine article about how bad the newspaper industry is. Several major newspapers have slashed their newsroom staffs as advertising -- classified advertising in particular -- and circulation has declined.

A couple of things leaped out at me from that article. One was that some of these newsrooms may have been overstaffed to begin with. I really don't know. Second is that the entire judgment that newspapers are endangered is based on the financial realities of a select group of major metro papers. The article mentioned the New York Times and some other papers, but not the Washington Post, for example.

The most glaring problem with the article is that it focused on the major metro dailies. One thing I learned as a short-term employee of GateHouse is that the money in newspapers is not in owning the big newspaper in the central city. It's in owning the smaller papers in the suburbs that ring the central city. The big paper can't cover every ball game or every parade in its circulation area, but the smaller paper can make a pretty good run at it.

When you hear about newspapers dying, ask which newspapers. True, The Herald-Dispatch's circulation numbers are down compared to a few years ago, as just about every newspaper's numbers are. But I don't think things are as bad here as the guys at the metros say they are there.