Newspapers of NW Ohio raise my eyebrows

On LinkedIn, I saw an ad for a newspaper editorial position. ME at a 6-day daily.

It, the Daily Standard, claims to cover three counties in northwest Ohio.

Problem?

Aside from its home county, the smaller of the other two counties has an online-only newspaper whose website is better than this newspapers.

And, the bigger of the other two counties? About 10 percent larger, it has its own daily paper. And, to make it more fun, that paper, in Auglaize County, claims to cover the Mercer County of the Daily Standard. The cities are the fun-to-say Wapakoneta, in Auglaize, and Celina, in Mercer. St. Mary's, on a lake of the same name, is just east of Mercer County into Auglaize. The Daily Standard claims to cover it. Wapakoneta has a separate paper for that city.

Second? Color me skeptical that a paper in a county of less than 50K, less than 45K in fact, has 10K subscribers. (Well, the website said 10K copies.)

Third, color me skeptical that in today's newspaper world, that it's 6 days in print, rather than 6 days of e-edition. (The Ohio Newspaper Association doesn't list subscriptions for any members.)

Plus, there's a group of weeklies by a company called DNI floating around bits of NW Ohio surrounding this paper, too.

Surely, none of the three (or more) papers in the area is doing THAT well. The Daily Standard has a rate card that sounds on the highish side for a place that has a cost of living the same as most of rural Texas. They do offer not only frequency rates but a sliding scale on larger sized ads, tis true. That itself is interesting; it's generally an industry no-no to publicly post your rate card. Even more so in a still theoretically competitive area. They are cheap on class frequency rates compared to Wapakoneta.

Anyway, no, I'd be skeptical of them.