Letter To Editor - Death Of Print Greatly Exaggerated
Editor's Note: We received a response to the letter below disputing claims that CentralMassNews.com is a franchise of Main Street Online. Click here to read that response.
Dear Editor,
I read your story “Hyperlocal News Sites Targeting Central Mass” with great interest and would like to offer my perspective as the publisher of six local newspapers and one monthly magazine in Central Massachusetts.
First off, your readers may be interested to know that the hyper-local websites run by Jack Schofield in Grafton are a franchise of Main Street Online, “a national community news company” according to its own web site seeking new investors. The parent company’s web site lists Schofield in what appears to be a staff listing and counts a former CEO of Forbes.com and CFO of Viacom as advisory board members.
Main Street Online is in the process of launching 61 different sites in New York, sites in Rhode Island targeting 170,000 residents, and a military base site in Arizona they hope can be a prototype across hundreds of bases in America.
We’re not surprised that Wall Street is finally waking up to the value of local news. We’ve known for years that publishing quality local news coverage is a terrific and rewarding business.
As a locally produced business newspaper, I am a bit surprised though that you painted all newspapers with the same broad brush.
The large, metropolitan daily newspapers face long-term challenges to their business model. But local, weekly newspapers are not suffering anywhere near the degree of their daily counterparts.
Just this month in a comprehensive study of suburban adults’ readership habits in 11 different markets, the University of Missouri found 66 percent of adults list suburban papers as their primary source for community and neighborhood news. Metro newspapers got only 20 percent of the respondents, and the Internet 22 percent.
In some categories like “local youth or high school sports,” the gap between suburban newspapers and online was even wider. If you’d like to read the entire study, visit suburban-news.org and click on “resources.”
Your story did do a good job explaining the wide gap in value advertisers are placing on digital ads.
That too is borne out in the University of Missouri study where 61 percent of respondents called online advertising “annoying” but 66 percent called newspaper ads “an important part of the experience.” In short, ads in newspapers are welcomed content. Online ads are typically not.
We are quite confident that printed newspapers and digital news feeds will coexist in the future, and media consumers will want both.
We currently publish under more than 10 online names also and continue to adjust to the changing technology and expectations of our readers and advertisers. For example, later this month we’ll launch an online summer camp expo as part of baystateparent.com.
So thanks for shedding some light on this topic, but we’re not feeling “like a relic of a previous age” over here.
Gareth Charter
Publisher
Holden Landmark Corp.
WBJ Web Partners
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