There’s a common thread between these two newspaper-industry case studies:

- Lean-and-mean community newspaper publishers who are thriving amid a collapsing print media sector;

- The Seattle Times, paradoxically in better shape now that Seattle is a one-newspaper town.

In both cases, the success of dead-tree editions boils down to a lack of local, in-depth reportage for those regions on the Web. It’s a glaring fall-through, considering that online micro-publishing is supposed to trump old media in that arena. It’s a similar situation with the advertising dollars: As much as Craigslist has gutted most dailies’ classified sections, it doesn’t serve small-scale community news coverage areas as well as print. And in Seattle, display advertising is finding a single major newspaper — with bolstered subscriber circulation — to have more effective reach than alternative outlets

It’s notable that these favorable conditions for broadsheets and tabloids apply to both small markets like rural Georgia, as well as a big metro like Seattle. It points to how the Web functions a little too much like a scale-dependent mass-market medium — traffic numbers still rely on population, concentrated or not. Whether or not this persists as the Web becomes even more ubiquitous, and thus truly the first-choice media channel for everyone, remains to be seen. If nothing else, it provides breathing room to the most endangered of big-city dailies (none of which have folded in the nearly half-year since they were marked for death — surprising).