Exploring Local Newspapers

On a recent drive from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, I made a point of picking up an example of many small town's local newspapers. I now have a pile of nine that includes the 46-cent Redding Record Searchlight and the free Williams Pioneer Review. I made a list of the cities and looked up their populations. I was curious, for one thing, whether their sponsoring advertisers were led, as is true in my Los Gatos weekly, by Realtors.

I found, first of all, that five and six-digit population numbers are hard to digest at a glance. I reduced each community's population to number in scientific notation x 10⁴. Thus, a number 2 town has between 15,000 and 25,000 people. Los Gatos, where I live, is a number 3. Redding is an 8, while Williams is a 0 (less than 5,000--3,670 to be precise).

Every one of the papers I collected has a web site. The free Williams paper, for example, uses a technology called Issuu Pro. The whole printed page is available, ads and all, in a web browser, along with the ability to zoom in and out and move around the page. When you "turn" the page, it almost seems like you are turning the page (that is, it is animated).

I was slightly surprised that even small-town papers, like the Red Bluff Daily News or the Roseburg News-Review, charged 50-cents or more. (Both cities are 2s, by the way.) My sister lives near Hillsboro, Oregon--a 9--and the Hillsboro Argus was 75-cents.

Above the fold on the front page, 7 of the 9 papers featured only articles by their reporters. The Redding paper and the Vacaville Reporter, sadly, had stories from the Associated Press right up front.

Some of the papers look just awful--"desktop publishing" has made the tools available to everyone for 20 years now, but the Siskiyou Daily News (covering Yreka, Weed, and Dunsmuir, among other communities in Siskiyou County, CA) badly botched their front-page coverage of after-holiday shopping. Uninspired, amateur photos of unrelated sizes were squeezed together with a caption block that had 20-pt top and bottom margins and 2-pt left and right. The headline, "Black Friday," was set in an Arial knockoff font, and the descender on the "y" ran into the photo.

I was particularly impressed by the layout and design of the Eugene Register-Guard. Very nice use of whitespace and fonts. The national news sidebar in column one has a colored background and apparently teases AP stories inside, but that fact isn't emphasized. Very readable and well-designed. The lead stories are by Register-Guard reporters, with professional photos placed appropriately. Horizontal rules are thick-over-thin. Of course, Eugene is a 15 on the population scale. The population of Siskiyou County is a 4.

The Register-Guard seems to make good use of their web site, as well, reminding readers at the top of page one: "Breaking news throughout the day: registerguard.com." The web site is as good as the best major daily newspaper web sites, in my rather cursory estimation.

Another example of good layout and design comes from the 2-on-the-population-scale Roseburg News-Review. Someone tacked on some small-caps headlines that really don't work (the capitals are not proportional to the lowercase letters in weight), but they have a great photo of kids in a cart above the headline "Ready, set shop!" that's very appealing. Of four stories on the front page, however, two are AP. Like several of the papers, the News-Review has two sections and the second section is Sports. They are online at nrtoday.com and it's a well-done web site.

The Hillsboro Argus includes a 12-page insert, "A Look Inside Hillsboro Schools," that seems to be an advertising supplement by the school district, but it is not labeled as such and uses the same fonts and footer as the main paper. Obvious ads are also inserted: Fred Meyer (something like Target), Dick's Sporting Goods (local chain), and Coastal Farm & Ranch (local chain).

While a few of the papers feature paid real estate listings, none were as dominated by Realtors as the Los Gatos paper. The Roseburg paper has ads for local jewelers, a book and stationery store, a plumber, a professional organizer, the local Dish Network installer, a medical center, a chiropractor. Nearly every display ad was for a local, non-chain retail business. A large ad by MorganStanley welcomed their new local financial advisor. Page 9 was a full-page ad by Sherm's Discount Thunderbird Market on 60 specific items.

I'm rethinking how fast dead-tree newspapers will disappear. The market ad in the Roseburg News-Review--Brussel Sprouts 99 cents a pound, no kidding--could have been copied from a 1940s newspaper, except for the prices. How many people in Roseburg have access to the Internet? From my perspective, zooming by at 65 mph, it seems that the News-Review is covering the town of 21,050 pretty darned well.