A newspaper that is saving money without cutting jobs

do you really think the average reader in bakersfield (or any other place) really gives a rat's ass about any of that when it happens a thousand miles away?

 

Um, yea. Most people care about stuff that happens outside their community. Refusing to acknowledge that and forcing us to do "hyperlocal" bullshit is a huge reason why newspapers are ceasing to be relevant.

 

If I want to read about the Russo-Georgian War, I'll pick up The Washington Post. If I want to find out whether the local sanitation commission is raising rates again and who's saying what, I expect my local paper to go much more in depth into that issue than The Post.

Then again, my shop may be a small local weekly, but I still follow "if it bleeds, it leads." And there's been plenty of blood.

 

There's a difference between hyperlocal and three grafs on the Pirates-Brewers game (hell, we don't have that, and we have an outsized MLB presence). If (big if) the money is used to hire a reporter to uncover Bakersfield College recruiting or staff the tracks and do GA work, then the loss of sports briefing from AP might be a reasonable tradeoff in certain markets. I agree that it's bunk if the money is used either to paint an office or get 20-hour grunts to rewrite Oly copy off Yahoo.

 

Papers cut AP = AP cuts jobs.

This is good news for journalists?

 

They won't hire new employees with the savings.

And have fun trying to put agate packages together, because you won't get nearly as much without AP.

Actually ... that won't be an issue. It's a negotiating tactic to try to force AP to accept a smaller assessment. Eventually, they'll make a deal.

(If they don't .... RUN!)

 

just like cnhi said last year that it was dumping ap at all its papers...and now one of its honchos is on the ap board.

spokane's move to dump ap within 30 days is very, very scary.

 

I was hoping I could leave this business before I puked.

I was wrong. This thread has made me puke. People scrounging stories like Dutch Reagan, in some podunk Iowa town a hundred years ago, making up purple tales of baseball heroics over the radio from bare bones ticker-tape reports. Shrinking, shrinking, shrinking the product and the ambition while wondering why fewer people bother to buy it. People like us debating it all, trying to find the lesser of the two Satanic evils.

Just shut off the presses and turn off the lights. Newspapers that run this way do not want to be in business anymore. An advertiser or a subscriber who still patronizes one is too stupid to save. It is over.

 

I guarantee you more readers than you're willing to admit care a hell of a lot more about that than they do about some high school volleyball match or Little League regional loser's bracket semifinal game.

 

Where are you going to pick up the Washington Post in Bakersfield, Calif.? I don't know what the line necessarily should be, circulation-wise, but I do know that a paper the size of Bakersfield should at least make the effort to present a view of the world beyond Bakersfield.

Why does there have to be a choice between one or the other? Why shouldn't the paper make an effort to do both?

 

It absolutely should. I'm not at a big shop by any means, but our philosophy is this: If a person was stranded on a desert island and their only contact with the outside world was our paper washing ashore, could they stay relatively informed about the world?

Again, newspapers are not in a position to give their readers excuses to go elsewhere for information. The more one-stop shopping we can provide, the better.

 

With all the cuts in newshole and staff, there is increasingly less context in the daily newspaper. Bakersfield, or anywhere else, doesn't exist in a vacuum. There is a larger sports world outside of the local fishin' hole and the charity 5K fun run on saturday morning. There's no way for people to connect what newspapers are presenting as their cities and communities if that coverage isn't grounded in the larger world around them, at least not on a large scale, which is what the general interest newspaper is all about.

At least that's my two cents, plus tax.