A few years ago, I was sitting in the regional office of a senior regulatory official with the FDA. At the time, I was the publisher of Food Chemical News, a regulatory information service that she and many other FDA and USDA officials subscribed to – and, I’m pretty sure, still do.
It wasn’t a sales call, exactly. About 1,000 miles from our home base in Washington, D.C., it was more one of those show-the-flag tours to solidify and, perhaps, expand our relationship with some of our biggest customers. So I asked her why she spent hundreds of dollars a year to subscribe.
“It’s the only way I can find out what’s really going on back at headquarters,” she said.
I was reminded of that conversation when I read media writer Howie Kurz’s recent column in the Washington Post on the findings of a Pew Charitable Trust report warning that the decline of general circulation of newspapers would cede the field to more narrowly focused publications like – you guessed it, Food Chemical News – that wouldn’t devote the necessary resources to digging the dirt out of the federal government and industry.
Naturally, I’m a bit biased, but I think the report has it wrong. The decline of newspapers may be a concern for a lot of reasons, but it isn’t because niche publications – whose subscribers often shell out over a thousand dollars a year for information they can’t get anywhere else – aren’t ferreting out important information. In fact, I’d argue that if niche publications weren’t adequately getting to the heart of issues, the subscription model simply wouldn’t work.
And those subscribers are almost always critical influencers – including government regulators – who are a central element of many organizations’ communications strategy. Yet those publications are often overlooked by communications departments in favor of “glamour” outlets.
They shouldn’t be. In addition to having committed and influential subscribers, they have reporters who cover the issues of individual industry in more detail, more continuously, and often over a much longer period of time than reporters for general circulation media ever could. In fact, almost every niche-media reporter I know can tell at least one tale of how they had to bring an AP or New York Times reporter up to speed when some arcane issue suddenly grabbed the headlines.
While the Pew report may or may not be right about the sky falling, it may well be right about the increased importance of niche media. Whether traditional subscriber-based media or digital media using one of the emerging business models, niche reporters are likely to play an even bigger role in the next decade.
Cultivating relationships among those reporters/bloggers/Twitterers, and including them in your strategy, is critical.
