Cutting coverage

This will sound more than a bit contrairan, but my proposal here is quite the opposite of what would seem to make sense. The traditional wisdom has been that the best items to cut from a newspaper are coverages that not a lot of people read. I think that thinking is misguided.

I'm not saying that you should have reporters dedicated to completely obscure subjects like the sale of handwoven Mongolian baskets by illegal immigrants. What I am saying is that the number of people that read a story is actually the wrong metric. To me, the right metric is the number of people that will purchase the product just for that one story. The strategy to get there is to write about subjects that a few people care passionately about, and compile a bunch of things just like that. The stories should be the unique voices that are strongly compelling to a few people, and can't be duplicated elsewhere. Religion, science, and arts coverage routinely gets dropped because of the limited interest. I'm arguing that there are quite a number of people that get the paper exclusively for those areas.

Its important to remember that newspapers are a bundle. Consumers don't pick up just the stories they want, the get all of them for the same low price. Its similar to the cable industry that would make you get the entire digital plus package if you only wanted access on one channel on that tier. By doing that they can actually subsidize a number of weak offerings that are put together. It doesn't matter which of the ten or twenty channels you want, the fact is that you wanted at least one of them enough to pony up the extra cash.

This sort of thinking is very bad for consumers, who end up paying for things they don't actually want, but the newspaper has always been that way. Nearly no one reads every word written in a paper on any given day. Editors need to think how to appeal strongly to a series of niches far more than the middle of the road story that many will glance over.

This sort of thinking also doesn't work as well on the Internet, where the model is far more efficient. I can search for a particular area of interest and go straight to the article from a number of sources. The brand around the niche is what can build loyalty over time to web properties. It's the strategy of companies like Gawker who focus on a series of niches with separate but affiliated sites which all have a similar tone.

Realistically, newspapers have to do a bit of both to work. They need the big stories that have broad appeal along with narrow stories that inspire passions. My greatest argument here is their need to recognize the economic situation of the product and exploit it to maximum gain. Cable does it well, and maybe its this sort of thinking that Cablevision can bring to its otherwise panned acquisition of Newsday.