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Larry Pryor
Lary Pryor is Executive Editor of Online Journalism Review and Director/Online Journalism Program at Annenberg School for Communication and University of Southern California.
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Question: How can you define a "city guide"?
Larry Pryor: A city guide is a cross between a travel guide, a "Yellow Pages" phone book and a calendar listings of events. It tells someone everything they should know to function well in a city, from the best night clubs and restaurants, to what the hot concerts are this week (with a link to where you can buy tickets) to where you can buy good shirts or books. The best ones are interteractive and have recommendations from readers.
Q: Do you believe in the success of this new media? retour en haut de page
L.P.: No. They are much too expensive to produce and it is difficult to raise enough ad revenue to cover the costs of production and even to pay the ad sales staff. Small stores and restaurants do no put up enough money to pay for these costs.
Here's one more thing to think about, and helps explain why city guides are so expensive to produce: They are highly labor intensive. For a guide to be useful, it must be updated all the time. Things are constantly changing in a city. Restaurants close, new ones open. A great nightclub that you recommended changes management and becomes a drug den. Calendars of events must be fresh and accurate. Movie listings must be very accurate. etc etc. It is a nightmare. Some business plans contemplated having parts of the city guides maintained by citizens or restaurant owners (they would post their new menus themselves, etc.) but that is very difficult to do, except in the small community, perhaps. It also raises liability problems. It is another nightmare. If there are ten guides in Lyon, the most profitable one should try to buy up some of the others and put the rest out of business. Maybe, if you were the only guide in that city and you were very careful to manage costs, you could make a profit. But I would not invest in such an enterprise.
Q: How do you analyse the development of city guides in the United States? retour en haut de page
L.P.: Most of them have been closed or sharply cut back. Some smaller Newspapers have guides for their communities, but they are quite small and focused. Just imagine the problem of doing a good guide for an area like Southern California, with 13 million people and more than 100 cities. New-York, Chicago, etc. the same. But take a look at washingtonpost.com Theyhave a lot of useful information. It can be done, in other words, but It must be done carefully and not be allowed to get too big or unfocused.
I should have mentioned that city guides could be used as an alternative press, a place where information can be found that is not available in print or broadcast. That would be a good thing. But it is hard to make money out of that. You have to have a very lean operation, with little staff, probably run out of a home office. If costs can be minimized, this could work. But you would have to be very smart and know your audience and be able to market yourself. If you were good at that,you might even make a lot of money.
DERNIERE MISE A JOUR: 23 août 2001
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