Suburban Sprawl   

Reaching readers outside the city remains a vexing challenge for major metro papers.

FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS the growth of suburbs around the nation's large cities has had a profound effect on newspapers, ultimately sending dozens to the graveyard and forcing the survivors to confront complicated decisions about how best to provide suburban news coverage and advertising services.
These thoughts were occasioned by the Los Angeles Times' decision in September to shut down 14 "Our Times" local news sections that sought to provide the kind of intense local coverage of suburban communities ordinarily eschewed by metropolitan dailies.
The Times had hoped the community sections would improve circulation and advertising. But all were losing money at an increasing rate, management said. Eliminating the local sections, along with 125 employees, was the first major cost-cutting action by the Times' new owner, the Tribune Co.
The Times' "Our Times" effort was among the more elaborate that metropolitan papers have undertaken to improve suburban presences, and it points up how difficult--and expensive--it is to penetrate the suburbs in a market as vast and complicated as greater Los Angeles.
Indeed, the Tribune Co. has been at the forefront of suburban initiatives. Its Chicago Tribune, for example, began daily zoned sections in the early 1980s and now has seven (two are distributed within the city). The strategy was in response to competition from suburban publishing chains, notably Liberty Newspapers and the suburban publications owned by Hollinger International's Chicago Sun-Times.
I'll note, parenthetically, that Hollinger probably has not received sufficient credit for what it has accomplished at the Sun-Times, a newspaper that conventional wisdom had headed for extinction, having undergone three ownerships when Hollinger became the fourth in 1994. Since then Hollinger has enlarged the Sun-Times' ownership of suburban papers to more than 80 titles, both daily and weekly, and last year the Chicago operation overall had an operating profit margin of 12 percent--a remarkable achievement for a second newspaper.
Hollinger's strategy in Chicago illuminates another suburban approach that has taken hold in the newspaper business--buying up suburban competitors. I recall that in the 1970s, the U.S. Justice Department turned down on antitrust grounds an attempt by Tribune's Orlando Sentinel to acquire suburban weeklies in a rather distant part of the Orlando market.
Today, such antitrust concerns seem to have evaporated. Metropolitan papers all over the country have been permitted in recent years to purchase suburban competitors.
In effect, these newspapers are using the acquired weeklies to provide the intensely local coverage that the Los Angeles Times attempted to offer in the "Our Times" sections. They still have their own zoned suburban sections. The Washington Post, for example, has weekly zoned editions for each of the suburban counties in Maryland and Virginia. There can be some overlap, but the big dailies' zoned sections tend to concentrate on events of more broad appeal than what is offered by the down-deep coverage of suburban publications.
The Los Angeles Times likewise still offers a number of geographic zones, special editions covering notably Orange County, Ventura County and the San Fernando Valley, and it continues to own small dailies in Costa Mesa and Glendale. So the paper remains committed to the suburbs, but as Times Editor John Carroll was quoted as saying, "[T]here's more work that needs to be done in figuring out how you cover this region."
The suburbs remain a challenge, to the Times and most other metropolitan papers. Yet the challenge today is not at the life-or-death level it was when suburbs first started exploding in the 1950s.
The growth of television in the 1950s was a powerful factor in the competition for readers' attention back then, contributing to the demise of many afternoon papers. But equally important was the effect of suburbanization, fueled by the flight of the middle class from the cities. The middle class has always been the backbone of newspaper circulation.
Afternoon papers found it impossible to deliver a timely newspaper to their traditional readers now ensconced in the suburbs, since typically an afternoon paper's news stories had to leave the newsroom before 10 a.m. to allow production and delivery before the p.m. traffic jam. Even some morning papers were grievously affected. New York's Daily News saw its 2.1 million daily circulation dwindle to the present 731,000, as a majority of its traditional readers moved out. The Daily News never devised a successful suburban strategy, and its relocated readers eventually took up suburban newspapers.