Published: May 08, 2008 03:10 pm         

EDITORIAL: Community newspapers like ours remain strong and vibrant

It’s time for newspapers and their staffs to tell the other side of the story about our industry.

This past week, we read about the decline of newspaper circulation in most of the major markets across the country. But what we didn’t read about is the readership increase that has taken place in other parts of the country in our print products and the expansion of our Web sites.

The Crossville Chronicle in Cumberland County has experienced a 3 percent growth in our circulation this year over last year — not a decline as the metro and national media markets are reporting. Weekly newspapers and small dailies are experiencing growth as growth occurs in our respective communities and young adults develop an interest in their community. Our citizens are reading the newspaper because we are providing local news and information that is relative to the lives of the citizens in the community. Our citizens want to be kept informed of what their city and county governing bodies are doing with their tax dollars and they want to know what is happening inside the schools. Our local newspaper also serves as a photo album for school projects and athletic events. No where else can you see or read about football, basketball, soccer, wrestling, or volleyball that is occurring in our school system.

Seventy-four percent of adults read our printed product or our newspaper Web sites. This is during a seven-day week, Sunday through Saturday. This percentage is typical of all newspaper markets served by weekly or small daily newspapers.

The crossville-chronicle.com site was visited 96,955 times from April 6 through May 6, 2008. On average, each reader visited 2.62 pages for a total of 254,182 views in that one-month period. And they’re loyal customers. Eighty percent of our traffic is from return visitors.

We as a communication company feel it is time to provide positive information about our industry to our readers.

No one delivers local news better than your daily and weekly newspapers. We, as an industry, understand the need to deliver the news to different demographics by various delivery methods, and we do that well. We were one of the first weekly newspapers in the state to develop a Web site. Our site dates back to 1996. We have changed platforms several times during this period. And, while we lost valuable, easy to find archived news due to this process, we demanded our obituary archives not be put to death. They remain alive for all to see, though it does take several clicks to get there.

Our industry is alive and well and still considered the No. 1 means of delivering information to the people in our communities. Today, we do a better job than ever of delivering the news and advertising, because we can bring it immediately to our Web sites. This is what is happening in our market, and I’m sure there are other positive stories to be told by other newspaper companies across the country.

We are not all in a large metro market, where the greatest circulation loss has occurred. The fact is that the community newspaper business remains strong and vibrant.