Best place to be: large metropolitan or small daily/weekly?

The Sunday state edition of the Star Tribune can be found there at some stores. At one grocery store there was a slot for the Argus Leader but it was empty both times I was in there. So my guess is they used to be up there and backed out.

 

We seem to be talking about Aberdeen, South Dakota a lot so let's use it as an example. The circ number I saw for the paper was 13,000. The town has a public institution, Northern State, which is NCAA II and a private school, Presentation, which competes at the NAIA level. There is a public and a parochial high school. The day I looked at the website there were a lot of soccer stories.

At papers that size what stories typically draw the most hits? The stories about the most popular professional or power conference school, the local colleges playing below D-1 or the high schools?

Is there evidence that people in these small cities actually care about the local teams or are they interested in what they watch on television? I have lived in big metro markets and don't know.

 

I don't know what's big in the paper, but I do know that, at least in both men's and women's basketball, Northern State has led the nation in attendance for the last eight seasons.

 

I'm at a 20k daily with a D3 college and 15 high schools, and the hits are pretty spread out. But here, football is king, and we try to hit all the h.s. sports, and that along with pro teams and Ohio St an hour away all adds up to make our print product popular. It sounds foolish today, but print is still our main focus, even if every day we can count lost subscribers in the obits.