Yesterday’s News: What About the Weeklies?

I don’t want yesterday’s news. It’s not that what happened yesterday isn’t relevant, it’s just that I’ve already seen it and read it several times over the course of, well, yesterday. Google News, Yahoo, BBC, Twitter, RSS feeds, Yelp, etc… Timely news is on my desk almost immediately as it happens. Thus is the very problem with daily newspapers, a market which dwindling — daily.

So what about weeklies? We have two alternative weeklies here in Portland: The Portland Mercury and the Willamette Week. Other major cities have at least one as well: The Boston Phoenix, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Austin Chronicle, they are everywhere. Distributed for free, they’re generally full of locally focussed feature articles with skewed locally focused advertising. By design and by content they’re often more progressive than their daily cousin. They give a reader something to do at lunch. Or at the coffee shop. Or the bus stop. They’re as much entertainment outlets as they are news. They cover everything from politics to what’s going on in arts and entertainment that week.

While some weeklies like the Boston Phoenix have weathered the economic downturn (and the current internet trends) by cutting sections — the Phoenix cut from four sections per week down to two mostly black and white — others like LA’s City Beat have pulled the plug. But for the most part they seem to be weathering the the collapse of newspapers, albeit while suffering from some cutbacks, at least for now.

The Austin Chronicle (who’s founders also started the SXSW conference) saw $8.5 million in revenue last year. Only a 7 percent drop from the previous year. No layoffs. No plans for layoffs. In Austin, the Chronicle is part of the culture.

Local papers depend less on national advertisers than major metro dailies. They rely on bars, restaurants, and clubs — businesses from the community — the major advertisers balance them out. What has, however, driven all papers downhill is the near disappearance of classified advertising. Once a huge source of revenue, newspaper classifieds have gone the way of Craigslist and other free services which reach more people immediately. When I worked for a subsidiary of the Boston Phoenix in the mid-’90s classifieds accounted for a number of employees (to take the classified ads from customers) and an entire section of the weekly paper, plus assorted areas throughout. Each classified word represented revenue for the paper. Again, Craigslist is free.

Weekly newspaper content is often more directed at a communities core-culture, than it is focussed on news delivery. The stories weather the course of a week well. And they’re free. Weeklies that are resonating with readers have bridged the new media gap, keeping time sensitive news in online forms, getting writers active blogging, and creative online alliances and partnerships.

What weeklies have going for them is that people are still reading them, and at least in the major markets, that doesn’t seem to be changing. The terminal disease of the daily doesn’t seem to be effecting them. At least yet.

So, are weeklies going to last?

Related:
Read about print magazines that have fallen: magazinedeathpool.com
Seattle Post Intelligencer’s recent demise.
LA’s City Beat’s shutdown.

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