Where the readers are all strong,the ads are all good looking,and the newspapers are all above average

Via Romanesko comes a Hartford Courant interview with Garrison Keillor. Interesting stuff on newspapers and culture, that reveals Keillor as an unwitting member of the electronic fedora club:

Whatever the NEA report says - "Maybe cellphones are taking the place of the portable book," he suggests - Keillor has what some might consider a dumbly optimistic view of the future of the classics vs. the future of, say, David Letterman. But it's a firmly held view.

"In the course of doing `A Prairie Home Companion' we try to avoid pop culture references," he says. "We don't refer to things like `American Idol' - we wouldn't do jokes about it because you can no longer assume that the majority of people have seen this or know what you're talking about. The entire world of popular entertainment has become so fragmented that there are no longer uniting figures."

For example, despite Britney Spears' status as a recognizable celebrity, he says, few people would recognize her music as they still recognize Frank Sinatra's.

Keillor touches on the cultural shift that I think is being enabled by the enabling of the Long Tail: There are precious few "common experiences" for broad, national media to deliver. There's no Ed Sullivan show.

Check that-- there are thousands of Ed Sullivan shows, all with different lineups. You can't count on anyone knowing all the songs in the top ten anymore. So, how to unify through common experience? Go local.

... But I think that American newspapers have taken a very serious wrong turn, and that aside from a few newspapers the quality of the product is in decline, especially for the reader, and I think that newspapers have forgotten that their readers are readers and love writing - writing is what people want. They don't want a sort of concept of journalism; they want writers. And writers are always individuals.

"This is what people turn to newspapers for. They don't turn to newspapers for advice and for personal service and for sort of glossy pieces about lifestyle and home decor and cooking and how to bring up your children. They're really looking to newspapers for the same thing that people looked to newspapers for back before television - television didn't change anything and USA Today didn't really change anything."

I suspect there may be some context missing from Keillor's quote here, but here's my take: TV and USA Today didn't change the need that newspapers filled. Newspapers, however, were born and bred in the world of dominant broad media, and adapted unnecessarily. "Hmm. USA Today is popular. TV talk shows are popular. We have to be like them."

But in the Long Tail aughties, you don't. Technology enables you to serve readers in the same way you did back in the day. Sure, you may not be serving a certain segment, but that's OK. Your former mass is now a niche. And they're hungry for you to come back. I've seen the numbers.