Small Suburban Newspapers Far Less Screwed Than Big Dailies

An interesting stat from Suburban Newspapers of America: ad revenue among small community papers in its membership dropped a mere 2.4% to $482 million in Q2. Not surprisingly, they're touting that as a victory, and compared to the 13% plunge to $9.23 billion reported by the Newspaper Association of America, it is.

While they're not growing, they're also not laying off 1,000 workers, as Gannett (GCI) is reported to be doing this month.

It also makes sense: as we've noted before, small community newspapers are still providing a unique service, unlike many of the mid-market and larger dailies that spend a good portion of their newsprint acreage on stories that are widely available on the Web the day before.

MediaPost picks up an insightful point from Dick Porter, CEO of the Publishing Group of America:

If you pick up The New York Times, the front page of the Times is national and international news, and you can get a lot of it from another news source, in one form or another. But if you live in a small town and trash day moves from Tuesday to Thursday, who else is going to report that?

What does it mean? Time for publishers of community papers to figure out local news on the Web before someone else does.

See Also:
Cox Enterprises: Anyone Want To Buy A Newspaper?
Anyone Want To Buy A Newspaper? Didn't Think So
Newspaper Slide: Even Worse Than We Thought?
Uh Oh: Newspaper Digital Revenue Suffering, Too
Gone: 3,500 Newspaper Jobs In Two Months, $3.9B In Newspaper Stock In Two Weeks