Daily Blog: Newspapers Surviving in Mid-sized Cities

This week, the Wall Street Journal compared the fate of newspapers in big cities with those in smaller cities:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124087711048861559.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

How to explain the survival of newspapers in mid-sized cities while big papers in big cities are going bankrupt? According to the article:

"The formula for running a small-town newspaper would be familiar to any mom-and-pop business: No detail is too small and all business is personal.

"'It's not a Wall Street model, it's a hometown model,' says George Sample, known as 'Scoop,' chief executive of Sample News Group, which owns 10 papers in Pennsylvania and New York, including three recently acquired from GateHouse Media Inc."

This "hometown model" is still working because local businesses still need to buy advertising in the local paper. Thus, the drought of advertising dollars that is crippling major dailies has so far not hit the papers in mid-sized cities.

This is another example of how local communities are preserving their local cultures despite changing times and challenging economics.