Online Only in KCK

The move of the Kansas City Kansan to online-only in January is another example of a hail-Mary pass. The Kansan was founded in 1921 by Arthur Capper, the publisher and political leader. Capper was the Silvio Berlusconi of the Midlands; he used his newspapers (Capper's Weekly and the Topeka Daily Capital) to support his political interests, and vice versa. Kansas City, as a metropolis in two states, was blanketed by the Kansas City, Mo., Star and Times of William Rockhill Nelson; there was a second daily operation, the Journal Post, until World War II. I suspect the Kansan was to be Capper's voice in the Kansas City market, where his weekly, oriented to the rural population, would not circulate well. I suspect he also used the Kansan to tell politicians in KCK what he wanted done. But perhaps his aim was only to establish a Kansas identity for the Kansas side of the metropolis, as opposed to the then corrupt and wide-open Missouri side.

While the Kansan managed to punch its way up to around 25,000 daily circulation, that has to be put in the context of Wyandotte County, which is mostly Kansas City, Kan., having had a peak population of 185,000, and then there was Johnson County, Kan., to the south as well. The Star and Times each had around 350,000 circulation. As the suburbs of Johnson County grew to become the high-income district of metropolitan Kansas City, those people read the Star, not the Kansan. Wyandotte County and KCK began a decline that has brought the county population down to 155,000, and the city budget was only saved by a Cabela's store.

For its part, the Kansan became part of the Inland Newspapers chain, which, if an obscure memory serves, kept it alive in part as a test site for production machinery. Lately it has been printed at the Leavenworth Times as part of the GateHouse Media chain; there was probably some advertising overlap, as Leavenworth is becoming a northern suburb of Kansas City.

The Kansan was down to a daily circulation of about 8,000, and claims an online readership of 7,000. Perhaps they are the same people, in which case there is little risk here. It still covers Wyandotte County in the traditional manner, but apparently that will change as well. “This is not going to be a newspaper turned into an online product,” Kansan general manager Drew Savage was quoted as saying. “It’s going to have a completely different look.” The newspaper noted: "The format of the site will be more like a blog, making it easier for readers to scan through all the stories from a particular day and find the ones they wish to read more carefully." The estimable Howard Owens is in charge of this move, so I know it will be done creatively.

The story noted that "without the cumbersome tasks of page design and layout, and other duties associated with print, the online staff will be free to find more and varied stories to post online." The story also noted that "the Kansan staff is being reduced from eight people to four as a cost savings measure during the transition."

I wish no ill on any newspaper, but the Kansas City Kansan has been cooked for years. If they are eliminating their wire-service and paper and ink and fuel costs and still have to let go half the staff, their staff was probably going to be reduced to zero if they tried to run the presses. Online allows them a chance to reinvent themselves; but they long ago became a niche product, linked to a declining core city and a hold on the market that was marginal even in good times. Even the most diehard print believer would acknowledge that print is no longer the solution to all newspaper problems. And GateHouse is not putting any significant business at risk here.

As the always pointed Juan Giner recently said in a riposte to, who else, Jeff Jarvis:

"These are dead bodies in dead markets.
"Like the papers in Detroit.
"So, going online will not solve their problems.
"If you were not able to make money in print, how are you going to survive online?
"If you didn’t get enough readers and advertisers, how are you going to get them online?
"Only print newspapers making money, having readers and advertisers, and investing online will survive.
"If you were not innovative in print, how I can believe that you will be online?
"These newspapers are not casualties of the Internet, but print failures.
"These are not the papers of the future.
"They are the losers."

redbankgreen

Following up on downtown Red Bank and the former Register, there's a site called redbankgreen that deserves a look as an unheralded attempt (at least to me, but it's certainly not like the widely noticed New Haven etc. sites) to provide community news online. It is run by a couple -- he's a journalist, she's a graphic designer. Here's what they covered on Oct. 1 when I looked at it --

1. Some sort of railroad propane problem in Little Silver that tied up traffic. The initial report: "A leaking propane tank in the vicinity of the Little Silver train station is causing road and rail backups in Red Bank, according police radio transmissions. A train that's been reported to have been sitting in the Red Bank station for more than 20 minutes is causing a tie-up at Monmouth Street, according to the report." The site was doing posts every 20 minutes or so -- "5:45p: Branch Avenue in Little Silver remains closed as far north as Markham Place. 6:13p: We're still unable to get any information about the propane leak from the Little Silver Police Department, which is on the scene."
2. Man on the street interviews about the financial crisis, followed by comments of the usual sort. Pictures of all people interviewed.
3. A standalone photo of the pretty sort we all used to run on the front page back when it took three days to do color separations. Nice photo, though.

And a series of continuing references to a newer site called Red Bank oRBit, which describes itself as "a companion website to redbankgreen, delivering news, information and feature stories about all manner of amusements and culture in the verdant slice of northern Monmouth County, New Jersey that we call The Green. It is updated on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Red Bank oRBit exists because there’s just too much fun and mind-expanding stuff going on in these parts to fit into redbankgreen. It’s branded differently from its sibling website because, well, it insisted on it." What that means, exactly, I don't know. The couple works for this site as well, but it also has its own editor. Its emphasis is clearly the arts community, which has become quite large in Red Bank due to the Count Basie theater and, well, a lot of disposable income nearby.

The sites on the day I visited looked to have about 20 advertisers (I did a couple of refreshes to see if they changed) with the equivalent of newspaper contract ads. Clicking on them takes you to a Web site for the advertiser, which I suspect is hosted by redbankgreen. (To me this redbankgreen and Red Bank oRBit with a capitalized RB stuff is too cute by half, but that's just me.)

So I'm sitting here thinking:
1. Boy, you had to be a complete idiot to blow a daily newspaper franchise in this sort of market in the late 1980s. This is where Bell Labs was, for heaven's sake. Yet the Register did.
2. But how did they? Probably that they were close enough to New York and Newark that people who were looking for big news took those papers. The merchants around the malls would have put most of their inserts into the Asbury Park Press, which covered the entire county. Newspapers with sub-county-level circulation always have trouble because circulation is reported by county instead of by local trade area, so you can have 80 percent penetration in your area and 15 percent in the county as a whole and look like a weak sister. All you were left with was the merchants just in Red Bank, who by the late 1980s were probably still reeling from the mall down the road at Eatontown. (Red Bank had not yet been fully reborn as an arts center yet.)
3. In this case, regardless of county lines, the fact was that the Register was physically located less than 10 miles from the Press. Hard not to see them as direct competitors.
4. The problem of all suburban dailies. Red Bank, Fair Haven, Little Silver and Rumson are historically one unit, and what interests one interests all, but go eight more miles to Atlantic Highlands and they could give a darn about Red Bank. The propane problem in Little Silver was important if you lived near there or were driving around Red Bank; five miles away it was irrelevant unless it exploded and took part of Little Silver with it. In the Red Bank Register's case it didn't even have county government to itself as a common theme. You were just trying to shove enough local-local into the paper to appeal to someone in every town.

Speaking personally I would never care enough about local news to bother with something like redbankgreen, with its journalist wandering about and posting updates from the police scanner and asking Joe Smith what he thinks of the bailout. But then I don't use the computer flipping back and forth among five or six sites running at the same time (my problem with Facebook, Twitter, etc., which makes me so 20th-century). I can see my having more use for an arts-oriented site in terms of checking in once a week to see what to do for the weekend. On the other hand, for people whose lives revolve around the town in which they live -- whether in real terms or just in their own heads ("everyone looks at this to follow my comments on government waste!") -- this sort of thing works well.

This may be the future of local journalism, and if it is, fine, but rather than knocking it on its own terms, all I can say is that it would never have drawn me into journalism as a career in the way newspapers did. But then, I'm not growing up today. On the other hand, it is the local-local that readers want, and at my first paper as a reporter I did man on the street stuff and many a story on what ultimately was a nonevent and people liked those stories just fine. It just seems to lack a certain gravitas. If redbankgreen wants to rise up against the depredations of the Red Bank government, to be the civic conscience and scold, can it? Or is it just to be dismissed as "Joe Blow and his redbankgreen site, snicker, snicker."