In this month’s issue of Press Pass Q newsletter from Rivendell Media and Q Syndicate, Chuck Colbert posed the question if our community’s increasing move toward suburban and rural geographies might impact LGBT media.
Many of us have friends or know of same-sex couples who have settled down or even adopted children then escaped the urban jungle for serenity of the suburbs. That anecdotal evidence is increasingly supported by studies and stats.
And as the 2000 U.S. Census reported, 99 percent of the countries counties had a self-identified LGBT person as a resident. So our once urban-focused community literally now is documented to be everywhere.
So, that brings us to the question Colbert and other media professionals are pondering: Will this demographic shift change how LGBT media cover their local communities?
As Windy City Media Group publisher Tracy Baim states, this shift actually increases opportunity for WCMG properties including Windy City Times to push further into offering more online content.
“When it comes to catching up with reality and keeping up with trends, the Internet is the way to go. It’s safer, quicker, and cheaper to get to readers,” she explained to Press Pass Q, adding that the Internet empowers Windy City Times to become a “daily newspaper” with fresh online content.
That daily newspaper approach would also mean daily unique online site visits and increasing opportunities for new ad revenue.
South of Chicago, in the small communities of “downstate Illinois,” Prairie Flame Editor Buff Carmichael is seeing his newspaper increasingly popular in some 30 smaller cities across the state.
The LGBT residents and newcomers in his rural and suburban region are looking for local news affecting their non-urban communities, which according to Carmichael, has created a “news vacuum” so that Prairie Flame’s coverage of national news and national LGBT organizations is secondary because “our primary focus is on local events held throughout a vast region.”
This Press Pass Q article is a great read that covers the issue completely from increasing ad revenue potential from “gay sprawl,” a term coined by Bay Windows Co-Publisher Sue O’Connell, to understanding how the trend is redefining the new Southwest United States where New Mexico now ranks second, right behind Vermont, in the number of same-sex couples per thousand households.
The story also closes with a gem of a quote from David Stocum, co-publisher of Las Cruses, N.M.-based Southwest LGBT Press, about how he has expanded his news coverage and added columns and features to appeal to the now broader LGBT population in his readership area. The major effect of the new demographics is on content, Stocum said, “It is no longer enough to write about the Friday night lesbian potluck.”
So as LGBT media continues to evolve and meet our changing LGBT demographics, so must our ad buys, communications strategies and media campaigns adjust to 1) keep pace with new expansion of non-urban community news outlets and 2) remain on top of online opportunities with traditional hard copy urban newspapers already on our media radar.
That up-to-date knowledge pays off well for clients, companies, marketers and other communications professionals. The result in keeping up with the trend is more effective and increasingly efficient targeted communications with the ever broadening spectrum of our community.
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This suburban shift, which, as you note, also tracks the increasing number of LGBT families with children, also opens up opportunities for advertising specific to such families. Newspapers can now tap into day care providers, pediatricians, children’s concerts and events, and a whole host of other advertisers who may not have considered them previously.
I also think there’s opportunity for a paper to do a special “Kids’ Page” of LGBT-inclusive cartoons, games, and kid-appropriate news articles, a la the NY Times Upfront (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/upfront/index.html) or the WSJ Classroom Edition (http://wsjclassroomedition.com/). This might not be possible weekly, but maybe monthly?