An editorial entitled Meltdown to the Core in the current issue of Editor & Publisher magazines, the trade journal of the newspaper industry, laments how that declining industry’s cost-cutting guts attempts to serve growing niches of readership and is focuses instead on just the “core” brand name daily newspapers:
- “Whole segments of the once-universal newspaper market, including immigrants and youth, clearly shun the metro daily ‘core product’ these days. Newspapers can either offer them something else, or abandon them to their many new and eager competitors. Not all of these experiments will prove successful, but they must be attempted.
“Too many newspapers cling to the idea that their ‘brand’ will save them in the end — that by relying on a high-margin, albeit shrinking ‘core product,’ they alone will remain a mass medium in a splintered environment. They ignore the fact that to many in their most elusive audiences, the mainstream brand itself is a marketing impediment.”