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Wichita Eagle bails on Saturday print

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by BurnsWhenIPee, Aug 14, 2019.

  1. Fran Curci

    Fran Curci Well-Known Member

    The papers are hoping to keep almost all of their advertising revenues while reducing expenses. If they lose a bunch of revenue, they won't deem it a success and might not spread it further. Although I agree that the trend likely will spread.
     
  2. If there reduce or drop print, the will not keep the revenue.
     
  3. Doc Holliday

    Doc Holliday Well-Known Member

    Preps is our bread and butter in the South. We get more page views for preps sports coverage than anything else and that includes News or Major Division I college sports. Preps has plenty of staying power where it matters. Pro towns don't give a shit. But the South does.
     
  4. Fran Curci

    Fran Curci Well-Known Member

    The theory is --- and so far the numbers back it up -- that advertising on Saturday is so paltry, it's not much of a loss. Who knows -- maybe they already were selling Saturday ads at a steep discount.
     
  5. I would tend to agree. People like the Sunday paper and it's tough to make the print deadline for a Saturday edition
     
  6. Fredrick

    Fredrick Well-Known Member

    Then you are smart down South. Names sell papers; they always have and always will. Good for the south continuing to cover preps. Smart smart decision.
     
    Doc Holliday likes this.
  7. LanceyHoward

    LanceyHoward Well-Known Member

    Is your paper covering the large public high schools as separate beats?We discussed this on another thread and the consensus was that readers cared about their local high school and would read those. But readers did not tend to care about high school sports. So if the ran an article about two out of town teams playing for the regional conference championship it did not draw much interest.
     
  8. Doc Holliday

    Doc Holliday Well-Known Member


    Yes, the main schools are covered as beats by separate writers. We don't do one junk roundup page of all the high schools. We treat the high schools like they were a college team. The interest is clearly there as we have more page views for their stories than the local Division I university beat, although to be fair the numbers are comparable.
     
  9. LanceyHoward

    LanceyHoward Well-Known Member

  10. sgreenwell

    sgreenwell Well-Known Member

    At least when I was at Patch, the numbers reflected this, as well, and it wasn't like Rhode Island was some huge state with no geographical crossover; any championship game probably had a couple people in your town interested in it. But covering, say, the state championship in boys' soccer, that wouldn't get as many page views as a regular season game story about the town's team. (The one exception was football, which would sometimes do equal or better numbers, but still far less than a good 'breaking news' item.)
     
  11. apeman33

    apeman33 Well-Known Member

    "More than 100 U.S. newspapers have changed their printing frequency since 2004..."

    How many changed more than once? My paper changed five times. When I started out, it printed six days a week.
    * Eliminated Monday.
    * Changed Saturday morning publication to Sunday.
    * Changed that back when we went to all-mail delivery and switched all the other papers from afternoon to morning.
    * Eliminated Thursday.
    * Eliminated Tuesday and Friday.
     
  12. LanceyHoward

    LanceyHoward Well-Known Member

    There are about 1,700 daily papers in the United States. So only about 6% of the dailies have changed. I think that the majority of U.S. papers ill not be printing six times a week in three years. And I don't think the trend to cut daily editions will stop with just Saturday.

    I also think a lot of papers are going to move to mail delivery. The print editions keep shrinking and home delivery becomes more expensive per copy as the circulation continues to decline.
     
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