When I was writing my hip-hop column for the Chicago Sun-Times it quickly became a success. Every time I'd go out, members of the local music community would tell me that they looked forward to buying the Sun-Times on Friday. They wanted to know who I'd written about that week.
My philosophy was simple: Metropolitan newspapers should cover music the same way the cover high school sports. They should blanket the local artists, expose readers to the great music being done in their own scene, and shine some light on the cats who were breaking their backs for the art they loved. My reasoning for this was simple. If a reader wanted to read about Snoop Dogg or TI or Jay-Z they'd go to VIBE or Rolling Stone or any number of Web sites that had more access, a larger art budget, and way more space for storytelling than I could ever get in a once-a-week, 500-word column. If readers were interested in reading about Psalm One, the Molemen, or Galapagos4, they could find them in the Sun-Times on Friday. There was another thing at play here as well. People are, at their core, parochial beings. They want to take pride in their city, in their community, in what's their's. So if you give them a chance to read about what's going on locally, they just may be curious enough to become readers.
I've long believed the same thing was true for news sections as well: Give people the news the need, but can't find anywhere else! In this week's Christian Science Monitor, Dan McDonough Jr. and Alan Bauer of New Jersey's Elauwit Media drop some science.
At Elauwit Media, we learned long ago that people don't want to "pay" for their news anymore.
We know that, for advertising to be effective, people have to actually see the ads. Our business model and philosophy of making sure "Everybody Gets It. Everybody Reads It." pushes us to bring local news not found elsewhere to everybody who has an address in town. It fills a very specific need for our readers and it works so well that, for the past two years, we have been listed among South Jersey's 10 fastest-growing privately held companies. We've gone from a start-up in 2004 with $100,000 in revenue to a thriving company with revenues in excess of $2.4 million in 2008.
Click here for the full article. It's well worth a read.
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