"Too big to be small, too small to be big." Those are the words of the owner of the Messenger Post Newspapers , who put those papers up for sale this week. The MPN publishes 10 suburban weekly papers and a daily in the Finger Lakes.
The MPN sale is one indicator change in the traditional media market. Yesterday's launch of Her Rochester, the new Gannett (owners of the D&C) free glossy magazine, is another. Her, and Gannett's other recent experiment, the Insider , represent a big investment in our local media market.
Both of these moves are attempts by large media companies to adjust to Internet-driven media market fragmentation in Rochester. The au courant explanation for this fragmentation is the Long Tail . Or, as the media outlets probably see it, the Rochester herd is no longer happy eating from the same trough.
The long tail thesis, in a nutshell, is that people use the Internet to find a variety of less-popular but more personally interesting media. The media business effect of this phenomenon is growth of niche market publications (amateur and professional) and loss of mass-market ones.
This theory explains Gannett's changes. They understand that the D&C isn't going to address all the needs of the Rochester readers, so they've launched new publications aimed at smaller, more targeted audiences.
But what about MPN? Aren't their 10 dailies niche products, too?
I think the MPN has two problems: their niche is still gigantic, and their execution was awful. They are a cautionary tale for Gannett.
On the Internet, MPN is a diasaster. After closing down for a couple of months (pause to let that sink in), their site recently made the transition from for-pay, god-awful and 1995-looking to free, god-awful and 1999-looking. It is an assault on the eyes, a tabby-linky-blinky mess that is close to unusable. Visiting MPN on the web is the mental equivalent of drinking from Niagara Falls.
Instead of refining their niche by segmenting their presence by community served, MPN grinds everything together into hamburger. There are community-specific pages, but they're hard to find. And the advertising is still generic -- readers on the Brighton page get ads for boats in Canandaigua. In theory, MPN's niche is suburban neighborhoods. In practice, it's all of Rochester and more.
Gannett is doing better than MPN, but only slightly. The Gannett websites are nicer and their advertising is more relevant, but they're still generic by Internet standards. "Women" (Her) and "the kids nowadays" (Insider) address huge markets. When more readers and advertisers can find narrower niches (how about: young women in the SE suburbs who like yoga), they're going to ditch these publications.
When it comes to the media companies in Rochester, I agree with half of what the MPN owner said: "Too big to be small". There's a huge opportunity for targeted media in this town, and so far the big companies haven't tapped even a fraction of it.
