The future shape of The Dallas Morning News

Carolyn Barta of Dallas Blog reports that the DMN plans to "keep metro, business and sports at present strength but reduce lifestyles, arts and entertainment, some tabloids (excepting Taste and House & Garden) and bureaus." She asks, "Are they trying to cure the ills of declining circulation and ad revenues by offering....less?"

I suspect they are not trying to cure the patient as much as they are trying to delay an inevitable death. Or at least an inevitable mutation into something much less grand than what we think of when we think of the traditional major metropolitan daily newspaper.

There's a retailing concept called the long tail, popularized by Chris Anderson. He explains the concept in a nuthshell:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

The DMN is a victim of the long tail. The cost of newsprint prohibits them from publishing stories or whole sections that don't appeal to a broad base of subscribers. Online ventures like Dallas Blog, on the other hand, don't operate under the same constraints. Because disk space and bandwidth are essentially free, online publishers can fill their Web site with an infinite number of stories that appeal to only a few readers each, growing their readership one small niche at a time.

Of course, the DMN can do the same. Their strategy seems to be to conserve cash to survive long enough to build readership of their growing online presence. The proliferation of DMN blogs is evidence of this strategy. But it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Whether the DMN pulls off this reinvention of itself is far from a sure thing. In its favor is the fact that many of the writers for the upstart Web-based competition like Dallas Blog are "old dogs" from the DMN itself. So, maybe the DMN's chances are not such a long shot after all.