Why small-town Newspapers are starting to love their e-editions.

In 2010, when most newspapers adopted an e-edition, the growth in readership skyrocketed, sparking a flurry of attention. 

But e-editions - also called digital replicas - have failed to generate much excitement since then. Most readers read the news on browser-based websites. 

However, that viewpoint is starting to change. In the print-centric world of the small-town newspaper, the “flip-page” e-edition feels more like, well, the newspaper.

One fan of the e-edition is Eric Mayer, Associate publisher of Jackson Hole News & Guide. 

“The e-edition was a huge step forward,” he said. 

“The postal service takes a long time to get a newspaper to my Mom in Wisconsin. She can read on the browser, but the replica on her iPad is a better way to get through a girth of content.”

The use of tablets is also making the e-editions easier to use. 

He sees the digital replica as the best way to distribute the newspaper - along with its brand and its advertisers - to out of state readers, especially second homeowners and tourists willing to pay. 

And there are other benefits. 

“I would bet you $50 bucks that you could not touch and read every aspect in our newspaper’s  A section, value section, sports section and AE section on a browser. It is impossible,” he said. 

“You can in the e-edition. If we could all do it over we would have only published e-edition replicas.”

Another fan of the replica is Mark Guerringue, publisher of the Conway Daily Sun, and co-owner of a group of three free-circulation micros in Northern New Hampshire. 

”It keeps the integrity of the print edition,” he says and that placing interstitial ads in the E-edition has been one of the few digital initiatives successful in generating easy incremental revenue. 

He has also thought about going e-edition and print-only in one small market, leaving the browser behind, or even putting a paywall up on the browser to incentivize the use of the free e-reader with all the ads. But overall, the digital replica is a winner. 

Another e-edition strategy is to defray print costs by adding extra pages in the e-edition. One McClatchy-owned Raleigh and Durham newspaper publishes the “Extra Extra” an e-edition that covers some of the same territories as print, but with more pages. 

“The [e-edition] audience was steady and in some cases growing a product that didn’t necessarily need to be constrained, said Nick Ames, McClatchy’s director of client success in an interview in the Raleighco.com. Even the venerable Chicago Tribune now has an extra page e-edition strategy. 

For all the advantages to consumers of browser-based news, its weaknesses are slowly becoming more understood by readers. A reporter summed up the problem in a column for Politico.

“Reading online, I comprehend less and I finish fewer articles than I do when I have a newspaper in hand. Online, I often forget why I clicked a page in the first place and start clicking on outside links until I’m tumbling through cyberspace like a marooned astronaut.”

While still clickable, the e-reader keeps the shape of the newspaper and the shape of the newspaper experience. 

Then there is the problem of news distribution via social media links, where many consumers now go to “keep up.” A New York Times reporter who read print only for two months said the experience was liberating, as if freed from the “cognitive load of deciding whether or not the information was fake” along with the opinionating of news posters that go along with the links. 

He also reported absorbing more in less time, while feeling a sense that time had slowed down, maybe a little like going back to your home town, or just taking a kind of vacation from the attention-splattering of the attention economy. 

“In smaller towns, the layout of the newspaper visually shapes the stories,” said Thad Swiderski of Etype Services which supplies e-edition platforms to some 500 newspapers, mostly in towns with a population of less than 50,000. 

E-editions can drive circulation increases as much as 10-15%, he said.

“We try to replicate that on the browser with big home page images, and sectionalized news but the ads are often the news, so without the e-edition, part of the story is missing.”

On the whole, publishers use two basic e-edition strategies.

“Publishers can put the e-edition behind a paywall and tease stories to be read in the replica or make it available to all digital subscribers and then blast it out via email” providing additional circulation for advertisers.