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Recently I laid out theories of how market segmentation and niche-oriented service development could save newspapers -- or, more broadly, local news franchises.

I advocated conducting local consumer research, defining the most profound (from an information-appetite standpoint) and attractive (from an advertising-business standpoint) audience segments, and developing information services tailored to the demographics and interests of those segments.

To put it another way, "local interest" should not be the only filter for news and information, nor should the filter be applied exactly the same way to every customer, just because a news service's distribution happens to be limited to a local area.

Friends and colleagues politely dinged me on some points:

How can "The Daily Me" possibly be a print product? Even with modifications and investment, they said, newspaper content management, printing and distribution systems cannot effectively cope with the idea of granular personalization, such that every consumer receives a unique print product every day.

I agree. And that's not what I recommended, though I can see how people inferred it from what I wrote. It is not practical to print and deliver products personalized more deeply than the level of a typical newspaper section.

But I do believe modern printing, packaging and distribution systems could be tailored to build, for example, one core general-interest section everyone gets, then a handful of others (three, four, five, 10?) that could be delivered in targeted combinations that are individually addressed to households.

Even today, newspapers don't publish the exact same section roster every day. So if you mix-and-match by day already, and you add the ability to mix-and-match each day's bundle by doorstep, you have customization that is not purely individual but is granular enough to feel individual.

And that gives you enough possible niche channels to touch interests of just about any audience segment you wish to target.

What about printing press waste? Wouldn't all those press starts and stops eat into profitability?

Yes, but printing waste is a known, manageable commodity: a cost of doing business that is offset (pardon the double meaning) by the profits possible from increased capacity utilization.

A printing press is like an airliner. Neither can make its owner any money unless it is running. No airline executive in right mind would decide not to fly a full plane because the fuel costs too much. No publishing executive should refuse to run a press that's churning out ad-full pages because of the spoils or utility costs.

Wouldn't emphasis on niches drive up content costs? Who has time to report, write, edit, photograph and design all these niche products?

I say it's the same people who have time to produce the daily newspaper -- all 50-some value propositions -- every day. Content costs go up only if a publisher refuses to cut loose the low-value, underused content to make room for the content that meets the needs of identified, targeted market segments.

In other words, stop assuming you know what's best for your readers. Find out. Ask them. And be relentless about cutting the things you think are important but they don't -- unless you think the Fourth Estate still has the power to insist something is important. I don't, at least not for 99.9 percent of the daily newspapers in the United States.

Why not just do the niche products online?

I'm an online guy. I never said we shouldn't use online. Some niches -- sports, advertising verticals, opinion leadership -- just work better on the Web. My point was that a newspaper company should use all available distribution methods and audience reach to institutionalize a niche strategy.

In other words, don't assume the only way to segment audience into niches is with online services. Print can work for this. And it still holds value as a high-fidelity, usable, reliable way to convey information. Given the sheer amount of capital investment the industry still has on the books in printing, packaging and distribution, we better find new ways to use print.

What happens to deadline news?

What has already happened to deadline news? Newspapers must either concede breaking stories to the rest of the Web, or report breaking stories themselves on the Web. Print distribution cycles turn newspaper breaking news into nothing more than tardy, obligatory follow-ups.

Further, much of the content that could fill niche-interest sections does not require up-to-the-minute reporting. Fill press down time by producing sections that don't need overnight deadlines to be fresh.

The ding I didn't get

Through all that feedback, no one called me to task on the most probable flaw in my confederation of theories, and I'm surprised.

What do I see wrong with my theories? Not so much, as they relate to metropolitan markets where research can identify large enough interest and demographic segments to support niche information services. That means metro New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, the Bay Area, Dallas, Atlanta and their ilk -- megacities full of non-natives, ripe for audience segmentation in categories other than geography.

Last week, however, I traveled unexpectedly to southern Wisconsin, tending to a family matter. In the rolling prairies between Madison and Milwaukee, this state holds dozens of small towns with their own local newspapers, and a few midsize farm/factory cities that act as commercial hubs for one or more counties.

Janesville is one of those towns, with a population about 65,000 and a radius of influence maybe 20 miles out from city center.

And Janesville breaks my segmentation theory, to an extent. The Janesville Gazette, the local newspaper, isn't big enough. It probably can't build enough substantive, profitable market segments to do more than a handful of niche products above and beyond its core daily editions.

A real estate guide or car shopper? Maybe. But would The Gazette ever achieve the level of customization I described earlier? Nah, not even if most of it were online-only (at this time, the paper's Web site emphasizes content that originally appeared in the printed newspaper).

That said -- knowing you're limited to a one-size-fits-all daily news service for a community full of mostly long-time locals -- pretend you're the editor of The Gazette. Why, on a certain Monday, would you:

• Lead the front page with a wire service package on President Bush's mostly ceremonial visit to Russia?
• Provide, in your front page news roundup, large teasers to (a) an incremental political story about Republican plans to push a vaguely described Social Security agenda through Congress, or (b) a report on Israeli authorities jailing an extremist Jewish settler?
• Lead your Local/State page, on the day after Mother's Day, with a fluffy state wire story about a woman with 19 kids who lives well outside your paper's radius of influence?
• Relegate to the bottom of that same page a staff-produced story about retrofitting a community swimming pool to allow disabled kids to use it, and the resulting changes in fees to use it?
• Fill the State page (three-quarters newshole, only one-quarter advertising) with long wire stories datelined no closer than 40 miles, and with no particular local connection or relevance?
• Run 100 percent wire copy on the Sports front, that is almost 100 percent about pro sports, when the nearest covered sports team is the Milwaukee Brewers, based more than an hour to the east?

I just summarized the Monday, May 9, 2005 issue of The Janesville Gazette. And if I lived there, I can't imagine one reason I'd want to read that stuff.

It's less than two weeks since Bush was in Russia. Would you even remember it happened if I hadn't just reminded you?

Do the Republicans' political wrangles for their Social Security plan matter to anyone outside Washington until the plan either becomes law or doesn't?

Does any pro sports fan really need The Gazette to tell whether the Brewers won, the Heat won, or who won the Darlington race 12 hours after they all happened?

And could no one on the weekend general assignment crew find a truly local angle to Mother's Day? If not, why cover it at all? No doubt, the Sunday paper made adequate reference to the holiday without a follow-up.

Earlier I said "local interest" should not be the only filter for news and information in a locally distributed product. I believe that. But it should be a filter, and an important one -- more so the smaller and more tight-knit the community.

The trouble is, many news organizations seem to have lost sight of what "local interest" means, or have lost the resources or abilities to meet the real definition.

For instance, more people in the paper's radius of influence will be affected, positively or negatively, by the changes at that community pool than by almost any other story that was played better than that one in the paper.

Newspaper managers have to stop blindly assuming they are producing the only -- or the best -- news product their readers see every day. That assumption is what puts Bush/Putin in the lead spot on A1, and allows all the local sportswriters to doze because no high school events happen to be played on Sundays.

Janesville journalists, please understand I'm not picking on you. I know it's hard to fill a Monday paper and still cover the bases through the rest of the week. And I bet I could pick up almost any newspaper of similar size, and many significantly larger, and observe the same kinds of things on a Monday or many other weekdays.

This particular edition of this particular newspaper isn't the problem. It just exemplifies the problem.

If a community newspaper cannot meet local interests seven days a week, and chooses instead to fill the slow days with commodity out-of-market information, do we really believe those local readers and advertisers can't tell?

Who gave up on the Monday paper first? Us or them? I bet most Monday papers go out at a loss to their publishers, so why print them at all?

In markets too small for "nicheification," it's imperative that editors and publishers understand and serve their whole market as if it were a niche; the niche of Janesville, for example. Some ideas toward that end:

• Summarize national and international news unless it has clear local impact. If so, localize the story. If not, refer readers to online sources for details.
• Worried you can't fill a daily newshole without all that wire? OK, think back to how many days you complained about not enough newshole. This should end that. Either fill the wire slots with local or cut the news/ad ratio. Remember, too, that less reliance on wire probably means scaling back what you pay the wire services, as long as you can make the tough decision up front that you don't need rights to 100 stories or photos for every one you run.
• Worried that cutting the news/ad ratio will affect the credibility of the paper? Remember a significant portion of the audience engages with your newspaper for the ads. Ignoring that fact would be either arrogant or naive.
• Emphasize local personalities in business and sports coverage every day.
• Convert coverage of the slow increments of local institutions into "how this affects me" analysis.
• Eliminate the B-section "ghetto" for local news and make the front page at least 90 percent local (my old pals at The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind., did this for a long time and may still -- and that's one afternoon paper that has put up a helluva good fight for market share for years now).
• If you do zoned editions, embrace chicken dinners, military basic training announcements and lists of all public transactions: marriage licenses, divorces, bankruptcies, crime reports, business licenses. Drop that stuff in searchable databases online. That same Fort Wayne paper learned the value of little news with its Neighbors zoned editions starting back in the '80s, which had the motto, "No news is too small for Neighbors."
• In opinion content, advocate, crusade, argue, be bold, be confident, be adamant; but for Pete's sake, be local. National opinion column syndication needs to change radically (meaning, shift to interactive services) or die. If a reader wants George Will, he's easy enough to come by on-air or online.
• Which reminds me: At this point in Internet history, a prudent businessperson should assume that most everyone who wants to be online is, in some form. That means you don't need to buy and print commodity content "to get it out to the people who don't have online access." Yes, I realize the United States still has many underprivileged people who can't afford a Web account. But how many of them really want to read George Will?
• Let your online service own breaking news in your market, even if you have to report it a sentence at a time. Hold nothing urgent for the print edition.
• Ditto classified ads, at least private party ads. Make online the default buy and print the upsell for merchandise and for-sale-by-owner categories.

You get the idea. I can't imagine that a newspaper (and/or newspaper-based online service) that did these things wouldn't be eminently more interesting to its local readers -- and advertisers -- than most newspapers I see today.

It means we stop behaving like an information source confined to local audience, and start behaving like the best source for our local information, period.