New Print Competition For Old Roy’s Elk Grove Citizen

Battle of Elk Grove Media Titans - Elk Grove’s online behemoth takes on print behemoth

In today’s US mail, Elk Grove postal customers were greeted with a new print product – Elk Grove Monthly.

A glossy magazine, EGM is a new product offering from the local online giant Elk Grove Online.

While postal customers are accustomed to seeing the PennySaver, The Clipper, the Bee’s MVP, and a whole array of junk mail, EGO is attempting to diversify from being a wholly online advertising and chat forum enterprise. Although this has happened before, it is the first time in recent memory (at least locally) that an online enterprise has entered the print media.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out for both entities.

The upside for EGO is good. As it does not have a news staff to pay, a strong local brand identity, and a limited staff for the glossy, it has a good chance of eating into the Citizen's display revenues.


The new glossy could be troublesome for the Citizen. With a far higher readership than the Citizen, EGO can now offer its advertisers deeper market penetration.

The Citizen also faces other challenges:

- Attempts to relax public notice advertising requirements. Last year, for instance, The California Self Storage Association lobbied to allow posting of lien sales on online sites such as Craigslist. Although the California Newspaper Publisher Association fought back, you can bet businesses and government agencies will continue to seek changes to the costly public notice printing requirements.
Speaking of public notices, foreclosure activity will eventually slow down. For the Citizen, that is bad news. For well over a year, the Citizen has been running about nine pages of foreclosure notices per edition. This is significant revenue, and it will be hard to replace it.
- By its very nature, a print publication is not timely. For instance, Elk Grove News Net posted a news story over a week ago about MV Transportation’s campaign contributions to local city council members, while the Citizen published their story today.

While we do not wish the Citizen any ill-will, in fact, we really admire its longevity, it will be interesting to see how the changing face of the media plays out in Elk Grove.