Paper celebrates a year of defying national narrative
The Portland Daily Sun began publishing a year ago today
(Editor's Note: With this edition, the Daily Sun moves into its second year of publication. The newspaper launched Tuesday, Feb. 3 of 2009 with 4,000 copies, and more than tripled that initial readership over the next 15 months. To commemorate the milestone, the "Usually Reserved" column is addressing the newspaper industry in general, and free daily newspapers in particular, throughout the week.)
The Daily Sun must seem a true oddity — because if we know anything as a nation, we know that newspapers are a dying industry, nobody will pay for news and young adults are post-literate video-game zombies who approach current events with the zeal usually reserved for the Saturday morning free clinic.
It's all a mistaken national narrative that falls apart upon any consideration.
Pay for news? Of course we will, and do, with millions of newspaper subscriptions across the country. And companies like Bloomberg have become very successful selling news, albeit they cloak it as "information." There's a real issue as readers access news online, but that challenge also means more people are reading news than ever before — newspapers and others are only now figuring out how to turn that into profit.
(The real financial problems for newspapers comes from debt and the demise of regional advertising, but we'll get to that.)
Let's look at the last part of that common wisdom: Young people in this post-literate society, etc.
There is something fundamentally wrong with public discourse when serious people label a generation "post-literate" when the entire lot of them are obsessed with texting in a way usually reserved for painkiller addictions.
And, yes, that extends to news. A study last year indicated that well more than half of college students read their campus newspaper, and that when that paper is free and daily nearly 92 percent read it, and nearly all of those in the print format. Newspaper nay-sayers scoff at the idea that college papers mean anything, mostly because they are limited to the geographic campus, intensely focused on the school and free.
Hey, of course the kids are going to read something that's nearly always available, free and intensely relevant.
But that newspaper readership drops like a stone post-graduation, to well under 20 percent for some young adult age groups.
Here's a wild idea: What if you made their daily newspaper nearly always available, free and intensely relevant?
That's at least part of the thinking behind the free daily newspaper movement, which is playing against the national narrative across the United States. The Portland Daily Sun joins recent launches in Palo Alto, California and Vail, Colorado and a free daily even launched on Cape Cod over the past summer, but was designed to be seasonal. And it's exactly a small-biz secret: One of the most successful free daily launches was by The Washington Post, with its "Express" paper catering to commuters.
It's worth noting that many of these free dailies, including this one, trace at least part of their cultural DNA to a Vietnam-era college paper in Boulder, Colorado. The regents, upset with war coverage in 1970, kicked the paper off-campus. The kids continued as the Colorado Daily, a free tabloid-sized paper. Some of those kids floated into other papers, like the Vail Daily free paper. It helped that the Rocky Mountain News was one of the few middle-America mainstream papers publishing in the tabloid format.
It made Colorado the cradle of America's free daily movement. The state has a dozen "micro dailies" now, and some towns even have thriving daily newspaper wars. Aspen and Vail, for example, have hotly contested news battles. Those publishers led to others, like the ones who launched a tiny free daily in North Conway, New Hampshire in 1989. Now they have free dailies in Berlin and Laconia, and are my partners in this newspaper.
But along the way, free daily papers also became common in Europe, as anyone braving London's Underground knows. A major difference is that most of Europe's successful free dailies have been larger circulation, while most of those in the U.S. have been micro-dailies, in effect locally serving papers with total circulation under 25,000. Those of us interested in the "sustainable journalism" effort feel that, once you move into much higher circulation you become too expensive for many locally operated businesses.
There are other problems with bigger papers that makes them very vulnerable to losing readers to the Internet. The alchemy of news is information and location — thus a two-car crash with minor injuries in Augusta means little to you in Portland, while that same accident on your block is interesting. As American newspapers got larger, they maintained their original urban names but evolved into regional publications. They became, in effect, monopolies for highly effective print ads.
As the geographic relevance diminished community, papers responded by catering to communities of interest, and sections for gardeners, sports fans, auto zealots and other interests took hold. Unfortunately, if there's one place that the Internet excels, it's at providing information to communities of interest. Sections took the readership hit, and in truth many of the layoffs around the country are not for hard-news reporters but for section-serving feature writers. (And that's especially true where's there's newspaper competition.)
And if you're a regional publication, you need regional advertisers. As the recession, coupled with a trend for people to patronize smaller local merchants, took hold, regional papers felt the pinch. What we're seeing nationwide is not newspapers going out of business, but newspapers retreating from the temporary "bigness" that America's insane car-focused, chain-embracing culture spawned over the past decades.
The bigness brought monopoly pricing and monopoly customer service and monopoly profits. Large companies bought up local papers, turning the industry from mostly locally owned to mostly out-of-town owned in a matter of decades. Those newspaper properties were bundled like mortgages, and sold to even bigger companies for even more money. And recent headlines show those resulting groups going into bankruptcy, with hundreds of millions of dollars going unpaid.
But it goes beyond business. It's personal, or at least personnel.
Having managed in both news-competitive and news-monopoly environments, I can promise you they are different worlds — Mars and Krypton.
Personnel decisions in a monopoly environment are made like those in sane businesses: time of service, qualifications, justification of the decision. So it's unfortunate that many of our finer news hounds are ... how to say this? ... not always the nicest of people. The bitter cynic who awakens with fear and loathing, questioning authority and asking rude questions, just doesn't excel at the corporate team-building retreat.
In the old days, some editors said, "if a reporter has more than three people at their funeral, then they were a failure." The best hard-news reporter I ever worked with was a vile drunkard who twice set the office on fire and prompted co-workers to formally petition for his dismissal nearly weekly. But if a metro bus hit a car or obnoxious questions had to be asked, everyone knew he got the call.
On the business front, it also hurts that many saw this coming.
Even in the '90s, well before our economy was crashed, monopoly newspaper executives worried if the industry "could get small enough fast enough," and the trends of zoning and spinoffs of the era reflected that. But serious re-tooling was not part of the industry narrative, and now it's being forced upon us.
So much for theory. How's it working?
We launched one year ago with about 3,000 papers per day for our first week, which I'm assured by my start-up community was excellent. At the time, the industry (such that it is) suggested that getting to 10,000 consistently might take a year or so. Instead, we moved to that landmark in six months, and now average about 14,000 papers a day. Since a free paper gets passed along fairly easily (nobody else ever gets MY pricey New York Times), that means a bunch of readers. It's worth mentioning that even the traditional Portland Press Herald has taken note, offering its paper free at selected newsboxes on the Peninsula.
Over the year, we have attracted hundreds of advertisers; nearly all are locally owned and operated businesses.
For all that I would add this on the anniversary of our launch: Thank you ... for reading, advertising and pointing out when we say "Deering" we need to say street or avenue.
It's not that we don't know that, of course, it's that everyone needs reminding from time to time.
(Curtis Robinson is editor of The Portland Daily Sun. Contact him at curtis@portlanddailysun.me.)
