Right in the centre - Local, local, local.

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Published on Thursday, May 7, 2015

By Ken Waddell

The Neepawa Banner

While attending the Manitoba Community Newspaper Association annual meeting in Winnipeg last weekend, I was reminded of a truism. In real estate they say there’s three things that matter, location, location, location. In newspapers, the three things are local, local, local. The reason they call it a newspaper is because it’s supposed to contain news. It can be news about upcoming or completed events, it can be news by way of advertising about goods and services that are available. It can be news about local issues or wider issues that have a local relevance or connection. Local, local, local; news, news, news.

I have often said that a newspaper is like a three-legged stool with one leg being news, another advertising and the third being opinion. It’s still true and if you take away one leg of the stool, it becomes somewhat unstable.

So what about newspapers? Do they still have to be printed on paper? No, they don’t as we have seen in a number of larger centres where newspapers have gone “digital”. While there have been several attempts, few have made enough money to survive. This publication certainly has several digital components including a web site, Facebook presence and an emailed newsletter. However, the dollar value attained from the electronic endeavours is very small, very welcome, but very small. At the convention, it was confirmed that “very small income” is the case for most electronic newspaper endeavours. 

It was also confirmed that in many cases, local community newspapers are doing fairly well, much better than the big dailies. Another thing that we already knew was confirmed and that is that the larger corporately owned community papers aren’t doing as well and a newspaper’s performance usually drops off in direct proportion to how far away the paper is from the headquarters.

Considering newspapers as a source of news and information, they still rank number one in peoples’ minds and with good reason. When a news item appears in a newspaper, it usually has a reporter or author’s name attached to it. If you have any doubt about the truth of the story, the reporter or the editor is usually readily accessible and you can check out the source. Local reporters, editors or publishers obtain a deserved reputation for being reliable in most cases. When a mistake or error occurs, it can be corrected.

While the local paper is appropriately limited in its range or scope, such is not the case with the internet and internet news sites. They can throw any old thing they want on the internet and it can be tough to determine whether it’s true or false. There is in fact a lot of false information out there, assembling and recirculating itself as news on the “net”. The world has way too many repeaters and not enough reporters.

It all comes down to three other things: scope, reliability and capacity. A newspaper has to determine its natural market area. It might be a geographic community or group of communities. Some newspapers serve a membership community rather than a geographic community. Such is the case with various ethnic papers. They deal with a community of like-minded or similar background people even if they don’t serve a specific geographic community. Newspapers have to consider their scope or how big their market area is. They have to be as reliable as possible in the information that is put on the pages. They have to determine their capacity so that circulation doesn’t outstrip the financial resources. Income has to exceed expenses or the paper fails.

The Banner does its best every week to meet the above criteria and we hope to do so for many years to come.