My old friend and colleague, Martin Dunn, is very proud of his latest newspaper innovation: going back to basics, back to the days he spent as a local reporter on the Dudley Herald. About six months ago Martin, now editor-in-chief and deputy publisher of the New York Daily News, launched a series of community papers, serving the New York boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
The content is reminiscent of British local papers and small-town US papers. They concentrate on what really matters to people, their neighbourhood news, covering the local council in great depth, and they are filled with faces and places, carrying lots of high school sports reports and local crime-watch style material. Oh yes, and the advertising - in Martin's words - is "very, very targeted." The result? A huge success.
The distribution model is interesting too. A buyer of the New York Daily News on a Tuesday gets the appropriate title for his or her borough in the centre of the paper. But the plates are kept so that the News can run off several hundred thousand for hand delivery later in the week. According to Martin, the borough editions have become "a major win win."
Of course, no good idea in newspapers can remain a secret and no press mogul - especially one as fiercely competitive as Rupert Murdoch - was going to allow a rival to get away with a great idea. So, at the end of last month, Murdoch's News Corporation acquired two newspaper groups that have 28 weekly papers primarily serving Queens and Brooklyn. Murdoch owns the Daily News's rival, the New York Post (circ. 643,000), and in its announcement of the deal the company spoke of its desire to increase its reach outside Manhattan, appealing to the minority populations that have been strongholds of the Daily News (circ. 795,000).
The return to basics, to what is regarded in the States as hyperlocal, has been at the heart of several British local paper initiatives in recent years. And the move certainly isn't confined to New York. According to a lengthy article by Lisa Snedeker, the return to local news is the new big trend in the States. She writes: "After decades in which local news was supplanted by national and international stories, newspapers all across America are returning to their more humble roots, covering school board meetings and rotary lunches and high school swim meets. In terms of news coverage, it's the biggest thing to sweep through newsrooms in decades, and it's part of a fundamental reevaluation of the newspaper's role in the community."
She mentions the return to a local agenda by the Dallas Morning News and "similar, if less dramatic, changes" at the Washington Post, New Jersey's Bergen Record and Herald News, and the Richmond Times Dispatch. And joining them all, she says, is Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the States and publisher of the national title USA Today. She quotes a Gannett spokesperson, Tara Connell, saying: "We're going to get hyper-local."
But Snedeker raises the problem of cost. Local news is expensive to produce, and she writes: "It means having teams of reporters on the street covering the most mundane sort of news." But publishers tell her they can manage on their current staffing. Well, maybe they can. That's certainly a contentious point to watch. But if big city newspapers like the Daily News and the Post are prepared to get out and meet the people by offering local content then I'm all for it.
As far as I'm concerned, it's yet another example of the trend away from one-size-fits-all mass-market national papers (with their worthless celebrity content). The concept of mass-market papers is dead. In Britain and the States it's the papers with the largest circulations that are falling fastest. Well done Martin Dunn for treating New York like Dudley.
