The economy and the Internet are being blamed for killing big-city newspapers, but community publications are doing a pretty darn good job of surviving, thank you very much.

Bart Adams, publisher of The Daily Record in Dunn, North Carolina, likes to think his newspaper is successful because it practices something he calls refrigerator journalism. “People can clip out photos and put them on their refrigerator, so I think we build a real connection with the community,” said Adams, whose father, Hoover, founded the paper in 1950.

In fact, Adams’ strategy is to try to put as many names and photos of Dunn’s 10,000 residents in the paper as much as possible—The Daily Record has even kept the bygone days tradition of publishing everyone’s birthday.

“People can read about [President] Obama pretty much anywhere, but where are they going to read about their neighbors and friends?” Adams said.

That hometown touch and the fact that no other media outlet focuses so much on its community is a major reason why The Daily Record and its two sister papers in nearby towns are holding up relatively well. The company's ad revenues fell in 2009, but the Record Publishing Co. still made money because it cut several jobs, Adams said. Overall, earnings were slightly lower than in 2008, although the privately held publisher would not say by how much.

Like many community newspapers across the country, Adams’ papers are turning out to be more resilient than many large metropolitan newspapers, which are struggling like battleships to turn their businesses toward calmer and more productive waters.

Small newspapers aren't impervious to the recession, but they are faring much better than big papers. Community newspaper revenue fell an average 12.4 percent during the second quarter of 2009, according to the latest survey by Suburban Newspapers of America and the National Newspaper Association. The group halted its regular quarterly surveys later in the year, because publishers were reluctant to share data during the recession. But the second-quarter figure compared favorably with a 29 percent revenue decline for larger papers, according to NNA data.

“The big problem for larger newspapers is that a lot of the information they used to own, people can now get for free,” said Bill Reynolds, media director for the Erwin-Penland ad agency in Greenville, South Carolina. As a result, many dailies have had to cut good chunks of their staff and streamline their numerous sections. Yet most are still saddled with outsize properties and, for some, cumbersome distribution operations.

On the other hand, smaller newspapers have benefited from localized content not reported elsewhere, and subscription rates for most have remained robust, said Reynolds, who works with both metropolitan dailies and community newspapers. Moreover, many community newspapers can fetch more than twice the advertising rates of metropolitan papers in their region because they can selectively distribute to neighborhoods that have “more buying power,” he said.

Andrew Olsen agrees. His family publishes four weekly newspapers on the eastern tip of Long Island’s North Fork, and offers targeted buys for specific neighborhoods or package deals for ads in all of their papers. To diversify business, the Olsen family company, The Times/Review Newspapers in Mattituck, New York, also owns several tourism-related publications, such as The Wine Press, a free advertiser-supported guide to Long Island wineries.

Scot Kerr, president at Mediaspace Solutions in Norwalk, Connecticut, said that most community newspapers do not have the huge debt burden of many larger dailies. Plus, most smaller papers do not own their own printing presses, and so they have the ability to seek competing bids from outside printers.

But like larger papers, community newspapers have also been hit with declining classified-ad revenue due to job sites such as Monster.com and, more recently, Craigslist.com that enables people to list for free items they want to sell. To make up for the lost revenue, The Daily Record had to cut one of the two people on its classified staff, Adams said. However, he expects to see some pickup in classified advertising after the recession, as businesses in the small town generally still use his paper to advertise for local jobs instead of using the more high-profile job sites.