That's a question readers have asked in the wake of The N&O's launch of the new "Midtown Raleigh News." The weekly community newspaper is being distributed to some 55,000 readers in a new "Midtown" area, so designated by The News & Observer, that stretches from downtown Raleigh to near Knightdale to the east and Lynn Road to the west.

It joins The North Raleigh News, a community weekly that has enjoyed reader popularity and advertiser support since its start nine years ago. The stock-in-trade of both publications: ultra-local news about neighborhoods, schools, recreational sports and ordinary people.

The papers come either inserted into the main paper for N&O subscribers or as a separate paper delivered free to nonsubscribers in the affected areas. Distribution has leapt from 48,000 of the North Raleigh News alone to 115,000 of the two papers combined.

Jim McClure, The N&O's vice president for display advertising, says the Midtown edition was created to build on the North Raleigh paper. "Our goal was to expand that success to include the area that we thought both readers and advertisers wanted," he said. But to do that, The N&O had to set new distribution boundaries for both publications, and that has curdled the oatmeal of some readers of the old North Raleigh edition who find themselves becoming Midtowners.

"In this time of shrinking resources for the newspaper, I feel penalized by your decisions," wrote Kathy Bowler. "We live north of Lynn Road and west of Glenwood Avenue. You have decided that we are Midtown residents, rather than North Raleigh. We miss the North Raleigh section."

N&O managers say the content of the two publications is virtually identical. The same stories run in both, with the only changes being in how some stories are played. Why, then, two editions? Because ads can be swapped out between them to accommodate small advertisers who might want to run in one edition but not both. (Ad rates are lower in each than in the main N&O.)

Matthew Eisley, editor of both papers, says his biggest challenge has been to convince readers, especially fans of The North Raleigh News, that they're not getting less by becoming Midtowners. In fact, he said, they're getting more, because the larger geographic base allows for more advertisers, which means more pages for news content. "Everybody is getting more," he said. "They're still getting all the North Raleigh news they used to get, but they're also getting [news from] south of North Raleigh."

In truth, The N&O's definition of Midtown is weird. To me, downtown is not in midtown, but it's in the new distribution territory. And areas such as Lynn Road and Spring Forest Road are unarguably in North Raleigh. The Midtown label really centers on the shopping cores of Crabtree Valley Mall, Cameron Village, Five Points and North Hills Mall.

Likewise, the New North Raleigh News area ranges way outside North Raleigh to Wake Forest and beyond. Its geographic center comes close to Franklin County.

But for advertising purposes, the distribution zones had to be designed by ZIP code, and the Postal Service pays little attention to geographic cohesion in setting up delivery routes.

Eisley isn't fond of the distribution boundaries for his new publications, but he defends the notion of Midtown. "I really think we're where we were 20 or 25 years ago with the idea of there being a North Raleigh," he said. "Raleigh's got 383,000 people now, so it seems natural to me that in its evolution it starts acquiring sectional names." Actually, as a Midtown story pointed out, the concept of Midtown was hatched three years ago by planners and developers.

Some readers will ask: What about a South Raleigh News? That's a longer term goal.

Another question that readers brought to me: With the noticeable shrinking of the main newspaper for economic reasons, how can we justify creating new sections that involve delivering 60,000 or so free copies to people who don't subscribe to The N&O? "At a time when you're cutting back feature after feature, reducing staff and making your paper almost worthless, you decide to deliver the Midtown Raleigh News to everyone -- whether they want it or not or whether anyone even lives in the house," wrote Gerald Kroll.

It's a fair question, with a complicated answer. The simplest explanation is that The N&O actually saves money on distribution of Midtown News, compared with a previous advertising product that was mailed to nonsubscribers each week. Even though it's expensive to print all those free papers, The N&O more than makes that up from revenue from small businesses that have a new home for their ads.

And that, Eisley said, pays for local news coverage that otherwise would not be in The News & Observer. He pointed to a front-page Midtown/North Raleigh story last week about a city park in the Five Points area.

"That would have been a brief or a very small story in the City&State Section [of The N&O]. But I bet that's going to be very well read in the Midtown and North Raleigh News."

He added: "I think it gives us an opportunity to do much more fine-grained reporting than we were able to do."

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