Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter Hussman has a head-in-the-sand online publication model that he says works for him.

Hussman makes his argument via the "free-access" opinion section of a publication which employs the mostly-subscription online business model for which he argues.

It is Hussman's opening use of sweeping generalization that leaves me a bit disoriented. He seems to argue that all newspapers would benefit from adopting the Wall Street Journal model.

The world around me is not the same one he and the WSJ editorial staff live in (literally).

Although anywhere is still everywhere on the Internet, I suspect that products which are profitable in Little Rock, Ark., still sink without leaving behind a trace in Astoria, NY.

Just as the big, foil-wrapped burgers which sell well a block up Hillsboro St. at the Char Grill here in Raleigh, N.C., might fail to generate a self-sustaining enterprise on Wall St. in NYC, I suspect we should be wary of Hussman's "let's go home again" siren song.

You cannot, as Thomas Wolf warned.

It is no longer "there," save amid your memories.

Whether a publication will do better as a walled garden, or whether part of a publication will do well behind a pay wall in the manner of Times Select, still depends upon the market served.

Hussman conveniently ignores the difficult issues here by failing to note that paid newspaper circulation in industrialized countries was declining steadily before either the Web or the Internet were invented. The State of the News Media observed in a well-annotated overview:

The root problems go back to the late 1940s, when the percentage of Americans reading newspapers began to drop. But for years the U.S. population was growing so much that circulation kept rising and then, after 1970, remained stable.
That changed in 1990 when circulation began to decline in absolute numbers.
And the problem now appears to be more than fewer people developing the newspaper habit. People who used to read every day now read less often. Some people who used to read a newspaper have stopped altogether.
Today, just more than half of Americans (54 percent) read a newspaper during the week, somewhat more (62 percent) on Sundays, and the number is continuing to drop.

The 2007 issue of that report is enlightening, rather than distracting and misleading in the manner of Huffman. It addresses "hyper localism" -- a means of focusing on potentially profitable fragments of the larger market daily newspapers may once have addressed.

That strategy wasn't developed by people who were attempting to open the unfound door and go home again

"Hyper localism" is the product of honest market analysis, and so, it seems to me, legitimately deserving of our attention.

Technorati Tags: newspapers,hyper localism, walled garden,circulation