For years the Rodney Dangerfield of the media business, community newspapers are finally getting some respect from advertisers.
Experts say they are taking a more prominent role in media plans for a host of reasons: a general decline in readership and circulation among their big city daily cousins; the success of free dailies such as Metro; and the introduction of ComBase, a research database that provides media buyers with hard numbers on the readership of small papers.
“People are taking a second look, both on the ownership side because we are doing well as properties, but also on the advertising side because of the way the market has changed,” says John Hinds, chief executive of the Canadian Community Newspaper Association (CCNA).
Now, armed with its 2006 ComBase community newspaper research study, the CCNA is pushing hard for more federal government advertising, arguing that small papers are a cost-effective way to reach the estimated 29% of readers who don’t pick up a daily paper.
“A lot of [readers] are young mothers who are too busy to watch TV, too busy to read a daily, they are not doing a drive to work,” says Hinds. “The community newspaper is around and they are reading the paper because it is involving the community and their kids.” Small papers also tend to hang around the house, the CCNA reasons, making them a logical buy for follow-up ads featuring 1-800 numbers, a staple of government advertising.
The lobbying for more government ad spending, which began shortly after the Conservative government won power early last year, appears to be paying off.
Hinds says community newspapers are getting around 15% to 17% of the federal government’s ad spend today, whereas four years ago they received only 4% to 6%.
“There have been some advertisements from each [government] department,” notes Eileen Barak, the CCNA’s director of government affairs. Those include a public service announcement campaign from National Defence, a series of three Health Canada print ads and Foreign Affairs ads concerning passports.
The CCNA’s arguments in favour of its 700-plus English-language member papers are what any such organization would make for its medium: its consumers are hard to reach through other media, they’re affluent, and highly valuable to advertisers.
The arguments seem to be slowly sinking in, aided by better measurement tools and the leadership of large community newspaper publishers like Torstar Corp.’s Metroland unit, says Len Kubas, president of Toronto consultancy Kubas Consultants. Kubas says he’s impressed by the combination of investment in technology and marketing support, new presses capable of process colour on most pages and sophisticated readership and marketing research.
He cites Metroland’s millionsofreaders.com site, which he says is “one of the most technologically advanced marketing tools for newspapers anywhere in the world.” (Kubas has worked as a consultant for Metroland’s readership research for a number of years.)
He also points out that with an estimated $1.1 billion in annual advertising revenue, community newspapers account for a bigger share of the ad pie than higher-profile ad segments like consumer magazines, radio and outdoor.
At its annual meeting this May, Torstar attempted to redirect investor focus away from its flagship newspaper, the Toronto Star, towards its Metroland division-which generated the bulk of Torstar’s profits in the most recent quarter. “We’re big on readership and we’re big on statistical data,” says Kathie Braid, vice-president of marketing and corporate sales for Metroland, which operates 109 community papers. “For the last 20 years, long before ComBase, we’ve had our own readership study. We have used that very successfully.”
Though Metroland participates in ComBase only in a limited way, Braid acknowledges that Metroland’s newspapers are enjoying new national advertising from the likes of government and communications giants such as Bell Mobility and Telus, which coincides with the ComBase study. “It has taken us 25 years to be an overnight success. It has really been a building process over the years, with community newspapers really coming into their own now.”
More robust measurement and marketing tools, whether it be Metroland’s efforts or the CCNA’s ComBase studies, are having an effect. “There are a lot of markets where the reach of daily newspapers is not very good and to effectively reach the market you absolutely need the community paper,” says Debbie King, executive vice-president and COO of media agency ZenithOptimedia.
King notes the importance of smaller papers in buys is greater outside the major urban centres, where people “live and die vicariously through the community newspaper.”
She expects the CCNA to be successful with its push for more federal government advertising. “They are attracting it… you need to go in today’s research world beyond an ABC statement.”
The diverging business trajectories of big daily newspapers and community titles was evident at the industry’s recent “Super Conference” in Winnipeg. “We heard a lot of issues that the dailies are having with falling circulation, and we tend not to have that,” says Sean Lind, marketing manager of AdReach, the sales and marketing arm of the Ontario Community Newspaper Association. “Our controlled, or free, publications are immune to that because they grow with the size of their community.”
Community papers have already wrestled with the issue of free or paid circulation, with more than half the papers now given away. As for the big dailies’ other enemy, the Internet, community papers are less vulnerable on the content side because they are often the sole source for local news.
“Content is the big buzzword in media nowadays,” says Lind. “We have very unique content that is not available through the Internet, it’s local or hyper-local and we are the only ones writing it.”
