Sad news came out of Oklahoma City this week when The Oklahoman announced it was eliminating 57 positions throughout its organization.
This is in addition to a layoff in 2008 that put about 150 people out of work. I have a lot of friends at The Oklahoman and I suffer with them as they endure the changes in their business.Whenever a metro newspaper announces layoffs or other bad news, I field questions about the News-Star and how we’re doing. A lot of people depend on us for their news and advertising and they wonder if we’re on solid ground. If larger papers are struggling, then surely we are, too.
Fortunately, that’s not the case. Size matters and, in newspapers these days, smaller is much better. Many metro dailies are hurting, but most community newspapers are doing well. The News-Star is doing well, too. We tried to get ahead of the economic curve and started re-evaluating our business plan two years ago. Since then, we’ve made a lot of changes. Some were painful at the time, but they were necessary for the long-term good of the newspaper.
In this economy, no one is ready to start dancing any jigs out in the middle of Bell Street, but we’re ok financially and we’re hitting our budget. More people are reading our news than ever before and we’re still the best, most accurate news source for what’s going on in the Tri-County area.
I regularly talk with publishers of about a dozen other community newspapers in the area and they say much the same thing. They could always use another advertiser or a few more subscribers, but their businesses are sound and most of them have market penetration that metro newspapers can only lust after.
Gloria Trotter, co-publisher of the Tecumseh Countywide News & Shawnee Sun and president of the Oklahoma Press Association says that’s what she’s hearing, too.
“While it’s certainly true that some larger news organizations - television as well as newspapers - have had serious financial problems, it just isn’t the case for most of the smaller community newspapers,” she said. “I’ve talked to dozens of them during the past year or so, and most are doing as well or better than they did the year before.”
“People want their local news - about their schools, their churches, their local government - and they know we’re the only place they’ll get that. And our advertisers know that the people they want to reach read their local papers. That’s not going to change any time soon.”
Places like Shawnee and Tecumseh are good locations to publish newspapers. While a metro newspaper has to figure out how to deliver focused news and targeted advertising on a regional or statewide scale, our task is simpler and easier.
We distribute a daily newspaper to people who are likely to shop in the Shawnee area because that’s who our advertisers want to reach. Most other community newspapers target their immediate trade area, and that’s the reason most of them are doing pretty well. The business model makes sense.
To be sure, our business has changed in the last 18 months. We have responded by adjusting our internal work flows to adapt to life in an interactive world and we changed from covering national and international news to an intense focus on local news. Our staffing needs have changed, too, and we eliminated three positions at the end of last year. We also helped our overall operation by becoming a regional commercial printer. Few weekly newspapers maintain their own presses these days, so we’ve worked that into our business plan.
In addition to our own News-Star and Friday Gazette editions, our pressroom prints the Tecumseh Countywide News & Shawnee Sun, Meeker News, Prague Times-Herald, Stroud American, Okemah News Leader, Holdenville Tribune, Allen Advocate, Coalgate Record-Register, OBU Bison, University of Central Oklahoma Vista, Seminole State Collegian, El Latino, Stock Exchange and Canadian Valley Electralite. In April, we had 120 press starts and printed a little more than a third of a million copies. That’s a lot of news and advertising hitting the streets. To handle the work, we added new jobs in our pressroom and mailroom.
Our readership has grown steadily, but it, too, is different from what it used to be.
When I started in the newspaper business in 1977, people read the news on paper and that was it. Today, we actually have more people reading our work on News-Star.com than we do in the daily printed editions.
Somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 people will read a daily printed edition of the News-Star. Our website, by contrast, averaged 79,530 unique users per month through the first four months of the year.
A printed newspaper is still more profitable than an online one, but the business clearly is moving in a digital direction. Within the next month, in fact, we’ll roll out a new SMS text service and a mobile platform for people who want to get text updates on stories or browse News-Star.com on their phones. The newspaper business has changed in the last few years and will continue to evolve, but the News-Star is still here, we’re still healthy and we plan on bringing you local news and advertising for years to come.
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Sad news came out of Oklahoma City this week when The Oklahoman announced it was eliminating 57 positions throughout its organization.
This is in addition to a layoff in 2008 that put about 150 people out of work. I have a lot of friends at The Oklahoman and I suffer with them as they endure the changes in their business.Whenever a metro newspaper announces layoffs or other bad news, I field questions about the News-Star and how we’re doing. A lot of people depend on us for their news and advertising and they wonder if we’re on solid ground. If larger papers are struggling, then surely we are, too.
Fortunately, that’s not the case. Size matters and, in newspapers these days, smaller is much better. Many metro dailies are hurting, but most community newspapers are doing well. The News-Star is doing well, too. We tried to get ahead of the economic curve and started re-evaluating our business plan two years ago. Since then, we’ve made a lot of changes. Some were painful at the time, but they were necessary for the long-term good of the newspaper.
In this economy, no one is ready to start dancing any jigs out in the middle of Bell Street, but we’re ok financially and we’re hitting our budget. More people are reading our news than ever before and we’re still the best, most accurate news source for what’s going on in the Tri-County area.
I regularly talk with publishers of about a dozen other community newspapers in the area and they say much the same thing. They could always use another advertiser or a few more subscribers, but their businesses are sound and most of them have market penetration that metro newspapers can only lust after.
Gloria Trotter, co-publisher of the Tecumseh Countywide News & Shawnee Sun and president of the Oklahoma Press Association says that’s what she’s hearing, too.
“While it’s certainly true that some larger news organizations - television as well as newspapers - have had serious financial problems, it just isn’t the case for most of the smaller community newspapers,” she said. “I’ve talked to dozens of them during the past year or so, and most are doing as well or better than they did the year before.”
“People want their local news - about their schools, their churches, their local government - and they know we’re the only place they’ll get that. And our advertisers know that the people they want to reach read their local papers. That’s not going to change any time soon.”
Places like Shawnee and Tecumseh are good locations to publish newspapers. While a metro newspaper has to figure out how to deliver focused news and targeted advertising on a regional or statewide scale, our task is simpler and easier.
We distribute a daily newspaper to people who are likely to shop in the Shawnee area because that’s who our advertisers want to reach. Most other community newspapers target their immediate trade area, and that’s the reason most of them are doing pretty well. The business model makes sense.
To be sure, our business has changed in the last 18 months. We have responded by adjusting our internal work flows to adapt to life in an interactive world and we changed from covering national and international news to an intense focus on local news. Our staffing needs have changed, too, and we eliminated three positions at the end of last year. We also helped our overall operation by becoming a regional commercial printer. Few weekly newspapers maintain their own presses these days, so we’ve worked that into our business plan.
In addition to our own News-Star and Friday Gazette editions, our pressroom prints the Tecumseh Countywide News & Shawnee Sun, Meeker News, Prague Times-Herald, Stroud American, Okemah News Leader, Holdenville Tribune, Allen Advocate, Coalgate Record-Register, OBU Bison, University of Central Oklahoma Vista, Seminole State Collegian, El Latino, Stock Exchange and Canadian Valley Electralite. In April, we had 120 press starts and printed a little more than a third of a million copies. That’s a lot of news and advertising hitting the streets. To handle the work, we added new jobs in our pressroom and mailroom.
Our readership has grown steadily, but it, too, is different from what it used to be.
When I started in the newspaper business in 1977, people read the news on paper and that was it. Today, we actually have more people reading our work on News-Star.com than we do in the daily printed editions.
Somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 people will read a daily printed edition of the News-Star. Our website, by contrast, averaged 79,530 unique users per month through the first four months of the year.
A printed newspaper is still more profitable than an online one, but the business clearly is moving in a digital direction. Within the next month, in fact, we’ll roll out a new SMS text service and a mobile platform for people who want to get text updates on stories or browse News-Star.com on their phones. The newspaper business has changed in the last few years and will continue to evolve, but the News-Star is still here, we’re still healthy and we plan on bringing you local news and advertising for years to come.
