Monday’s edition of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer featured a segment on the rise of the free newspaper, specifically the two currently competing for eyeballs in the Washington D.C. market: the Examiner and the Express. The interview is available as a RealAudio clip on the site.
NewsHour’s site also contains extended versions of interviews which appear in the piece, from Express editor Dan Caccavaro, Washington Post executive editor Len Downie Jr., Examiner editor-in-chief John Wilpers, and the Washington editor for the Examiner, Karen DeWitt.
Interestingly enough, both Dan and John make the same argument in their respective interviews that they really aren’t competing with each other. Here’s John’s take:
TERENCE SMITH: Do you expect to compete with the Express, which is also trying to find another niche to service some people who aren’t regular newspaper readers?
JOHN WILPERS: I think their niche is not our niche. We’re going to be overlapping somewhat because we do distribute on the subways, and we do have boxes.
Their niche is younger and (their paper is) much shorter. Their papers tend to be anywhere from 24 to 28 pages. Their local news is one page with maybe three or four wire stories on it.
We have 12 to 14 pages of local stories, so we outdo them in terms of local news.
It’s a different niche. The Express is aiming at people who get on the subway and commute that way, most of whom are probably not local homeowners and taxpayers.
We’re looking at people who own a home and live in a community, and care about local zoning, local crime, local sports. So it’s a very, very different model.
And here’s Dan’s:
TERENCE SMITH: Anyway, now just months into your operation, you suddenly have competition, another freely distributed tabloid newspaper, the Examiner being produced and at the moment distributing even more copies than you are.
DAN CACCAVARO: Right. Well, it makes the market more complicated. It makes the market more competitive, but in a lot of ways, I think we’re not really going head to head — the Examiner and Express.
I think people see us as very similar because we’re both free, we’re both tabloid shaped, but I think we’re largely very different otherwise.
TERENCE SMITH: Characterize that difference.
DAN CACCAVARO: Well, first of all, in our, in our distribution model.
We distribute Express primarily at metro stops for commuters and also through news boxes in busy, busy places within the region. The Examiner — most of their distribution is free home delivery — so it’s being dropped at people’s doorsteps.
I think by that nature we’re very different. We are very much a commuter newspaper — and everything about the way we design the paper, edit the paper is geared toward people who are in a hurry in the morning.
They — you know, I can’t speak for what their aim is but what we’ve found is that our paper is appealing to people because it’s short, because the sensibility is young, because they find the design very appealing.
And so far we haven’t really seen any effect from the Examiner being in the market. We haven’t seen a drop in readership. In fact, the demand for the paper has been strong enough that we’re now bumping our circulation up to — heading toward 200,000 copies and we couldn’t do that if we were losing readers.
So, I think so far, it really felt to us like head-to-head competition.
(I’m going to assume there’s a “hasn’t” missing from that last line in the transcript.)
Meanwhile, Karen isn’t pulling any punches:
TERENCE SMITH: Can you see this paper coexisting with The Washington Post, The Washington Times, conceivably The Express?
KAREN DEWITT: I’m going to be diplomatic because I was going to say — you don’t want me to be diplomatic? We’re going to take their lunch! We’re going to take their lunch from them because I tell you, this is the wave of the future. We are going to be eating their lunch! All of them.
Heh. I saw those shots of the Examiner newsroom, and all I can say is, not with an office full of eMacs, you aren’t. (Although it is gratifying to learn that at least I’ll have a place to work when they finish eating the Post’s lunch.)
Finally, Len points out that the purchase of El Tiempo Latino may help to boost TWP revenue by serving as a bridge to the area’s rapidly-growing Spanish-speaking population, and adds that the various papers are separated for a reason:
LEN DOWNIE: All of our products are produced by separate staffs because I don’t know how to put out a newspaper like Express. I wouldn’t know how to edit a newspaper like El Tiempo Latino.
I know how to deal with a newspaper like The Washington Post. So we have people who know what they’re doing in those particular formats dealing with those newspapers.
Len’s interview concludes with his take on the new-media-vs-old-media argument that’s been getting increasing coverage of late at sites like PressThink, First Draft, and even places like Ars Technica:
TERENCE SMITH: So is it, is it fair to say that you welcome it, this free newspaper phenomenon?
LEN DOWNIE: I can’t say that I’m opposed to it. I think it’s always important to not think that new media are somehow going to kill off old media but, rather, old media need to adapt to the presence of new media. So that’s where our focus is.
It seems that the Post recognizes that a sea change in how people receive their news is coming, and it would be nice to be on top of the wave rather than buried beneath it.
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