I heard it said the other day that a newspaper is like a big ol’ Swiss Army knife. On the knife, you had the blade, of course. But you also had this toothpick thingy, maybe those little hard-to-use scissors and perhaps even an awl, of all things.
Traditionally, newspapers have covered the hard news – that’s the blade of the thing. There have been features, sports, business, comics … maybe that Sudoku thing is the newspaper’s awl.
It is a shame to lose any of that stuff. The beauty of the Swiss Army knife is all that stuff. But lately, the there has been a lot of emphasis in serving segments of our readership very, very well with specialized publications. Each niche within your readership – and those niches vary from market to market – are potentially lucrative communities within a community.
There is a great short discussion of this phenomenon on the Nieman Lab Web site. Comedian John Hodgman provides an interesting example of a small community that can be more meaningful than much larger, less well-organized masses.
So what does that mean to us? Several news organizations have attempted to harness the power of the niche. The Bakersfield Californian, for one, has been known to sell sponsorships for very specific niche “publications.” Here’s a blog they put together just for a single wrestling tournament. Once they set up the platform, creating new such blogs is a very simple thing.
The benefits of seeking to serve segments of your audience in a specialized way are several and not necessarily obvious. Many editors report that the comments they get on such online publications are much less boorish than what most of us see on our own more general Web sites. That is because parents are the only ones likely to be attracted to a blog on parenting, and so on. That sense of community carries things a long way…
It’s something to think about. If you have an event or a specific niche in your community, one that would be easy to sponsor, a niche product of some sort could be profitable. And if you are already doing something like this, I’d love to hear about it.
– Clay
Clay,
You seem to be right-on about small town papers surviving this economic crisis. It can’t be denied that our papers are a niche in themselves. We do not try to be everything to everyone, but represent the face of our community, keeping residents informed about events they have a stake in.
The smaller papers hold a special significance in our country in that, when put together, they are an accurate picture of Americans. We aren’t the glitz and glamour of any particular industry, or the tycoons of international banking, but we are the people who have always represented this country.
Kathryn, you mean you aren’t an international banking tycoon? I know what you mean and I agree.