Nouveau Niche   

Newspapers are once again turning to niche publishing.

New free or cheap dailies in Chicago, New York, Dallas and Washington, D.C., aimed at commuters and specifically at the 18-to-34 age group. Weeklies oriented toward young people in several of Gannett's daily markets, with more to come throughout the company's vast empire. New Spanish-language dailies in New York, Chicago and Dallas and probably soon in Los Angeles and Orlando.

What's going on here? Well, in some ways the U.S. newspaper industry is returning to the segmented market days of yore. In the 1800s and well into the 20th century, even many small cities had separate newspapers seeking different sets of readers. Typically one daily was for blue-collar workers and the other for everybody else.

In larger cities, the market divisions were more diverse--upscale, downscale, middle-class, often with two or more dailies in each segment. In the mix as well were dailies in Yiddish, German and other languages; in 1914, a peak year, there were 140 foreign-language dailies in the U.S.

What began to change all this was the gradual assimilation of immigrants into the English-speaking mainstream. Then came television, suburbanization and myriad social forces that eliminated many dailies and left most cities with just one newspaper.

Market segmentation for newspapers in the old-fashioned sense still exists in New York--the upscale Times, middle-class Daily News and downscale Post--and to a lesser extent in Boston and Chicago, but that's about it.

The new segmentation is in one way very different from the old: The industry recognizes that there is a large and growing portion of the population--young people--that is fully assimilated, English-speaking and relatively well off but nevertheless has not taken up daily newspaper reading in nearly the numbers of former days. This is the segment sought by new publications started by what I will call "mother" papers--the Chicago Tribune's RedEye, the Chicago Sun-Times' Red Streak, the Washington Post's Express, the Dallas Morning News' Quick. Similar in intent are the weeklies started by Gannett and others.

The ultimate hope with these endeavors is that young people will be attracted by the somewhat flashy, entertainment-oriented and greatly abbreviated journalism of these papers, will develop a daily newspaper-reading habit and will eventually move on to become regular readers of the mother papers.

Even if this does not happen (it's too early to tell), this young segment could develop into a profitable market by itself. The Chicago Tribune has said its RedEye now reaches more than 90,000 readers per day and has attracted 250 advertisers new to the Tribune, along with 300 regular Tribune advertisers.

Indeed, treating the young segment as a market unto itself is the sole goal of the Metro mass-transit dailies in Philadelphia and Boston; Tribune's new subway daily in New York, amNY; and a free daily in Dallas called A.M. Journal Express, started by American Consolidated Media, owner of small papers in Texas and Oklahoma.

The other part of the new segmentation harks back to the foreign-language press that thrived in the early 20th century. This time the language mainly is Spanish, although some weekly efforts are in Vietnamese and other languages.

Tribune Co. started the Spanish-language Hoy in New York in 1998 and last year transferred the concept to Chicago with plans to introduce Hoy in two other of its markets, Los Angeles and Orlando. Also last year, the Dallas Morning News started a Spanish-language daily, Al Día, which was followed by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's expansion of its twice-weekly La Estrella to daily publication. (See "Dismantling the Language Barrier," October/November.)

What these moves signify is something the Miami Herald learned the hard way in the 1970s upon the influx of Spanish speakers from Cuba and elsewhere: Immigration is rising much faster than assimilation is, and newspapers with expanding Hispanic populations risk losing a substantial number of potential readers. The Herald's El Nuevo Herald, initially founded as a daily supplement in 1987, may be the first modern example of a mother paper creating a newspaper solely for a foreign-language segment of the population.

There are many more examples of dailies creating niche publications, too many to mention here, and they do not all involve big-city papers. The Centre Daily Times in State College, Pennsylvania, home to Penn State University, recently created a daily tabloid aimed at college students that is wrapped around the regular paper.

However it's done--and concepts differ according to local market conditions--the move to segmentation heralds a new strategy for an industry beleaguered by waning circulation.