Guy in Starbucks: "It's not even worth it to pick up a newspaper anymore."

You are right.The suits and meeting people who wouldn't know a good story if it bit them in the ass don't agree. They win. The business, as a result, is dead. Keep shooting that online video, editors, it's really making you money. Dumbshits.

 

This.

We've cut the water cooler and janitorial staff and we can't cover any event that would involve an overnight stay, but we just dropped $1,000+ on video equipment and wasted two hours of training (not to mention the hours we'll waste actually recording and editing these videos).

Why? For a web site that generates almost no ad revenue.

 

It's all boiled down to newspapers as a whole lacking true substance. As reporters, we are supposed to report and write stories. Others do great page layouts. Others take great pictures. Some do impressive video work.

So now we are going to just make everything do a little of everything, even if some of it sucks (my video skills) and we've never been properly trained? Now that means two or three fewer stories a week to put together a couple videos a week (put in the time to shoot and edit thrm) that have good content but still barely get 50 page views and are given away for free online.

I definitely don't have all the answers to this industry's problems, but it's incredibly obvious that what the suits are doing isn't working. Sadly, I think it's too late to change captains and keep the ship from hitting rock bottom. The ship is already halfway there.

Instead of reinvesting in what we do best and travel to write more quality stories that can be package in the print product, the suits buy expensive video equipment to make videos given away for free because no one can make online advertising profitable enough.

Some day, historians will look back on this time and wonder how a bunch of greedy CEOs and clueless managers can help destroy an industry that could have survived with better overall planning, fiscal discipline and actual vision.

 

Tell hondo we said hi.

 

Obviously, this wasn't in one of the 900 Starbucks that closed. Whose parent company has fired nearly 10,000 employees in the last 22 months and seen its stock worth one-third of what it was 22 months ago?
Perhaps the young chap is in banking or investment or lending or real estate or the automotive industry?

 

I read a paper copy of a newspaper EVERY day. I live in the DC suburbs so most days I read the Wash Post and I spend about an hour doing that. I don't read everything in it because I'm not interested in everything in it.


When I am in another town/city; I get the local paper/nearest city paper and I read that instead of the Wash Post. Obviously, I am not interested in much detail about the local real estate scene in other locales, but I read much of that "foreign" paper when I am away.


The Wash Post has shrunk significantly over the last 18 months. And it has cut out a lot of things I used to be interested in. There is now a much higher fraction of the paper that I don't care about - - and so I ignore it. That's an empirical observation not a hypothesis.


The Wash Post can only be characterized as a liberal leaning newspaper. But its editorial/analytical slant has nothing to do with the fact that as it continues to reduce its coverages, I find myself missing things I wanted to read about and seeing a greater percentage of things I don't care about. There will come a point - - it is not imminent - - where I will probably seek another newspaper as my "daily read" if the Post continues on the path it has been on for the last two years. It will have nothing to do with liberal or conservative; it will have everything to do with the Post cutting out coverage of what I want to read about.


Having levelled that criticism at the Post, let me say that I would be hard pressed to move to some of the other similarly sized cities in the US and to rely on the local papers there as my "morning fix" for news. What I want to read most are accounts of what happened in the last 24 hours with a small dose of news analysis and editorial stuff. Getting that as the main course for a newspaper these days is becoming harder and harder.

 

Most of the people running newspapers seem to believe you already know what happened in the past 24 hours, so they are toying with the idea of ignoring the previous 24 hours completely.

 

Frank Ridgeway:

I fear you are correct. And if that is the case, I will eventually cease to be a subscriber and a reader of newspapers.


On another thread I said that I had let my subscription to Time magazine lapse after subscribing since the mid-60s because it had become more like People magazine than a news source. The new Newsweek was "unimpressive at best"; US News was not the answer since it is a monthly now.


I now subscribe to and read The Economist.


When/if the Wash Post goes too far along the lines of Time/People and gets too far from The Economist, I will be shopping for a new newspaper to read...

 

The guy sounds like another right-wing asshat who gets all his news from the Fox Noise Channel...

They're good at whining, but they never do much of anything. Probably one of the idiots who got us in the financial mess we're in now ...

The "liberal media" thing is just another old, tired argument from a bunch of old, tired people with old, tired ideas.

But there was a kernel of truth in what the guy's saying ... the "full of nothing" thing applies to a lot of our papers. Our paper has shrunk so much that people are complaining.

 

Head of Nail, I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Hammer. WHACK!

 

I've worked in metro newsrooms for a long, long time, which means I'm getting old and I know I'm frequently tired. But from the inside, I know there is truth to complaints about the liberal leanings in those rooms -- it's a natural extension of just who it is decides to study journalism and work for campus papers and so on, usually not the kids from the business school. I know, too, that the reality of that, whipped up by the growing perception, is a very real problem: The business community in each market I've worked didn't trust/like/respect the paper, and even that isn't all bad if you've earned those sentiments honestly.

I don't want to get this thread moved to Politics. But I believe we're into the "doth protest too much" stage of newsies mocking claims of liberal bias. As if they're entirely fabricated. They aren't (I know what I've seen and heard at work, from people who reinforce each other's views and think they're the norm). And a price has been and is paying paid for it. I don't think it is the reason newspapers are struggling and failing; I think it is the reason more people aren't mourning that or aren't upset by it.

 

There are liberals in newspapers, but in my experience, they try so hard to not be biased that they sometimes end up being biased toward the right. See New York Times, Iraq war. Also, a certain generation, X, tends to be more right-wing in its views I guess because of where it landed in the eras the kids grew up in: Reagan "happy days." But this guy sounds like a Rush listener just trying to do whatever's cool that day. You know, drink your latte, call the newspaper biased and left-wing, wear the right cool clothes, talk about buying a "big-screen." What an asshat.