Smaller papers are by no means more insulated from advertising slumps, especially as chains like Wal-Mart and Dollar Store, who mostly don’t advertise, drive out the local grocery stores and hardware stores. It’s hard to publish community newspapers in smaller towns when the downtown is a collection of empty store fronts — which is what many smaller publishers are facing in Central and Western Kansas towns. Let’s not even get into cash flow problems when your biggest advertisers lock their doors for the last time.

The advantage the Post was pointing out is temporary. Many smaller, independent community newspaper owners have made good livings for themselves — and rightly so. But many have the advantage of having their properties paid off. As they begin to retire, they are beginning to realize how difficult a proposition it is to find a like-minded independent potential owner that can afford to live off the scraps left over after paying off the debt of a newspaper purchase while trying to afford rising printing bills and increasing postage cost. (Let’s remember that postal delivery is the main way many small papers are circulated.)

When one large advertiser pulls back, it causes problems. Unlike a larger paper, the loss of (or pullback of some advertising from) just one car dealer alone can bring pain at a community newspaper.

Granted, smaller papers have smaller staffs and they don’t carry heavy payrolls. That’s because they don’t have the reach, nor have budgets big enough to justify a 200 newsroom. They can also adapt to change faster than larger, more bureaucratic newsrooms. But they lack the resources, unless they’re owned by a larger group or partnered with other news organizations. This is where the large papers have the leg up… and with the impending demise of the major metro comes the greater need for more wire service offerings for those smaller papers.

I likened it to someone the other day with the metaphor that only cockroaches would survive a nuclear blast, but it didn’t quite make sense, and it insults small papers….

The metro papers (and mind you, I’ve been at large metros and small papers alike) have to face the reality they can’t broadcast anymore. It’s time to microzone, as arduous as that sounds, and as unrealistic as it might seem for some major newsrooms.

Enough of my incoherent rambling. Fact is, small papers have issues of their own, and while they will do well in the changing media landscape, it’s not as though everything’s wine and roses for them. And it never will be.