Newsless.org

Howard Weaver writes a sweet, short paean to the dailiness of the newspaper:

I’ve been arguing for years that newspapers – yes, printed, daily newspapers – have a good long horizon on the value curve if they shift their focus to the value they already do best: summary, briefings, orientation, authentication. If a printed product did that well, the fact that it’s a once-a-day product would be a strength: a starting point, presumably first thing in the morning, which helped readers orient their day and prepare to parse and interpret all the fact-clotted data that would wash over them ceaselessly for the rest of the day.

I replied by asking why daily was the ideal cycle. “I might be part of a tiny minority in this regard,” I said, “but a weekly local news product would be even more valuable to me than a daily one, so valuable I’d probably even pay for it, if it was good enough.”

Howard’s response to me makes sense. Each of us, of course, has a routine that more-or-less repeats each day. It’s perfectly sensible that this routine should include a news component. And I wholeheartedly agree with him on this point:

I don’t think there’s any either/or here; let a thousand flowers bloom. A weekly compilation of quotidian news (tee hee) might be the best format for it. Other news, we all recognize, needs to be displayed as quickly as possible. A newsless, process-oriented news report should be timeless.

I agree that we should be working towards a news report online that serves the monthly visitor just as well as the hourly one. But cycles still drive how we produce the news. And many local journalists have to wedge their work into one of two cycles — either the rapid rotations that require updates every few minutes, especially favored by news sites in the morning and during the lunch hour, or the daily rotation driven by each day’s newspaper or broadcast.

I still wonder whether some news topics (and consumers) don’t demand different cycles entirely. In Columbia, for example, headlines on municipal matters often crescendo around the City Council meetings that take place on the first and third Mondays of the month. So news on this topic roughly corresponds to a biweekly cycle. And the biweekly publishing schedule of the Columbia Business Times, the local news publication that focuses on these municipal issues, suggests that this pace is well-matched to the topic. We often fret that these municipal stories don’t find much of an audience, but the Business Times is mailed to 6,300 local subscribers, which just about matches the daily circulation of the Columbia Missourian.

I suspect the Business Times audience might also have more of an appetite and expectation for deeper, more contextual stories than the general-interest Missourian audience. The cover story of the most recent issue of the Business Times was a massive series on transportation development districts that actually ran first in the Missourian. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that CBT readers ate that story up, while many Missourian readers skipped it.¹

Sure, topical newspaper sections in most places publish on a less-than-daily schedule. A typical newspaper might feature a Tuesday food section, a Wednesday business section, a Thursday arts-and-entertainment section, etc. These sections might even approximate the production cycle of a weekly more closely than a daily. But by bundling these sections into a daily product, mightn’t we be restricting their appeal to an audience who just wants that information, and doesn’t need it every day?

I gather niche publishing hasn’t been a silver bullet for those news orgs that have wandered into this territory. (Having spent three years as the online editor of a niche publication, I’m familiar with some of the problems.) But I have only the dimmest sense of what’s been tried in this regard. I’d love to see more experiments that paired the depth of a Columbia Tomorrow with the pace of a Columbia Business Times.

1. As you can tell from the “I suspect”s and “I wouldn’t be surprised”s in this paragraph, I don’t think we have much hard data either way, but boy, I’d sure love to see it. [↩]

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