I recently took on the shitty “task” of updating our media list.
More an observer and critic than a marketing analyst (and certainly not a newspaper entrepreneur), I quickly saw the job as a record of the sad shuttering of small papers.
One editor lamented the closing of his Connecticut paper’s sister sites, noting: “These are beautiful towns with remarkable residents and we enjoyed being their print and digital local news source. … Newspapering is a business we truly love and it saddens us to leave after such a long run. Unfortunately we could not operate at a financial loss here any longer.”
An editor of a dying Vermont paper wrote: “The suffering at this family of local papers not only hurts; it is a canary in the coal mine. I hope others are paying attention.”
Of course, one problem was the papers’ print culture being outrun by technology. Sure, paper feels better but it’s no longer needed.
Another problem was the business model. Which all reminds me of my days peddling copies or our journal to old-fashioned newsstands. In my early days at NEJHE, when it was called Connection, I yearned for some presence at newsstands. I would walk a few copies each month over to Out of Town News in Harvard Square. From the winter of 1996 through the fall of 1998, Connection was also distributed to bookstores nationally by New Jersey-based Bernhard DeBoer Inc. And it was sold (barely) at the Borders bookstore in downtown Boston, as well as the BU Bookstore and a bookstore in Portland, Maine.
I was stunned how informal the whole thing was. I’d leave the magazines. They’d return however many didn’t sell and the negligible cash from those that did. I was asking for a lower percentage per copy sold than other publications because all I wanted was the exposure. Yet, even in that context, it felt odd to do business based on a few dollar bills.
Sadly, the business model didn’t work for newsstands either. The operators of Out of Town News announced they would shut down the iconic kiosk in the middle of Harvard Square by Oct. 31, 2019.
