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

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Sneed, Jun 19, 2009.

  1. Kato

    Kato Well-Known Member

    I was moved to our universal desk for three days a week this summer and do sports twice a week (I am -- I hope -- a sportswriter the rest of the year), but I often wonder how best to serve our readers when it comes to using wire copy in small sections. Do I post results of games that happen the previous night (of course, I do big events like NBA playoffs) or do I find a good, smart feature that might pique some readers' interest? I like the idea of running some of those features, but a young copy editor criticized me the other day for running one of those instead of college world series coverage.
     
  2. sportsguydave

    sportsguydave Active Member

    Kato:

    It's a dilemma, I know. At our paper, we cut two columns out of our agate page ... on the right side of the page. We use that page for national sports briefs now ... five or six stories that ordinarily wouldn't have gotten into the paper.

    The good, smart features seem to be coming less often from AP .. but when they do, we try to run them.

    During the regular seasons, we try to run roundups of major sports. We highlight our regional teams and try to do roundups on everything else... with our space issues, sometimes the other games just get a paragraph. But it's better than nothing, I think.
     
  3. Kato

    Kato Well-Known Member

    Do you think this is because of AP's own cutbacks or because they know newspapers don't have the space to run them? ...

    We also cut our agate down and no longer run box scores for national sports. We're a 25K and heavy on local, followed by state AP. On a busy Thursday sports night in the fall and winter we have very little space anymore for anything outside of that.

    The good news is we give people a lot of good local coverage and that keeps us relevant to readers (I hope, anyway), but the dilemma comes in the quieter times. Do people want to read a CWS roundup in an area that doesn't really follow DI college baseball (I think our young guy follow's ESPN's lead more than our sport editor's) or an interesting in-depth story on how colleges are trying to bend Title IX rules by calling cheerleading a sport (something I ran because I thought it was interesting and also relevant locally because the college here has had some gender-equity issues).

    Which does the guy in Starbucks want?
     
  4. Sneed

    Sneed Guest

    I'd agree with everyone on here who's said that people are mostly complaining because papers are getting so small. The local paper in the city where I went to college literally shrunk the size of the paper it printed on to cut production costs or something. Then they kept weeding out more coverage.

    They've got ads running up the right side of the front page. It's painful. Plus it's constantly filled with typos and grammatical errors.

    The point I'm going for is this: people are noticing the decline not only in newspaper relevance, but newspaper content quality. While I was still in school, I was eating lunch with a guy one time, a sophomore, who picked it up, read it, and said, "Man, there's just nothing in these anymore, why does anyone read them?" He also said he hated the ads on the front page. This was coming from someone whose only relationship with newspapers was that he knew I wrote for one and that he read them on occasion. Even the young folks out there are realizing that newspapers are suffocating, and don't get why.

    I don't know if it'll save newspapers--I honestly don't think papers will ever completely disappear--but we've got to continue to take pride in what we do. If we don't, nobody else will.
     
  5. Smasher_Sloan

    Smasher_Sloan Active Member

    I <i>wish</i> 7-Eleven had corndogs.
     
  6. Herbert Anchovy

    Herbert Anchovy Active Member

    Did these presumptive stock trader yuppies -- the same vermin that have brought the western world to its knees -- begin to twirl their big heavy Rolexes, the bands fitted so loosely that they flop and flounder around on their bony wrists, the new "gang sign" for wealth and indifference?

    Must be why I haven't been in a coffee shop outside Europe in a good 10 years. And I can't remember a single time I've not bought a newspaper or at least thought about it at a breakfast diner.
     
  7. ringer

    ringer Active Member

    A little perspective from today's headlines:

    Times Reporter Escapes Taliban After 7 Months
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/world/asia/21taliban.html?hp

    Yeah, newspaper reporters are just out there producing garbage, writing crap. So where is the Starbucks guy getting his information on the Taliban? Twitter?
     
  8. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    Amen. I'm a moderate, but I listen to Sean Hannity in the 20 minutes from work to home because I find him entertaining in an infuriating sort of way. And he never infuriates me more than the whole media thing, which of course is then parroted by people who haven't a clue, and so on and so on ...
     
  9. RedSmithClone

    RedSmithClone Active Member

    So I may be called an asshat or worse for this, but I do see the guys point. I have spent my entire career between two shops. The first with an editorial page right of center and my current place slightly left of center. Now we all get upset with the liberal bias label - which I as a person in the biz do see. Now the issue is whether or not the leanings of the op-ed pages leak out into placement of stories or worse - actual content. That I think is the issue. Does it happen? Honestly I think it does. On both sides. It just so happens there are more papers with op-ed pages leaning left.

    Let the roast begin in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . .
     
  10. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    I'm interested in what makes you think that, Red. Honestly, I don't even know two of the five people on our (right-of-center) editorial board at my current paper. And the publisher, also one of the five, likely doesn't have a clue who I am. Where are the so-called "leaks" coming from and how do they filter down into the news content?
     
  11. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    Can't roast you, because that's not unreasonable.

    The thing that drives me up the wall, and always has, is the thought that a vast left-wing conspiracy steers daily news coverage decisions at every paper not in New Hampshire, or whatever.

    There ARE biases, because there are human beings. There are NOT conspiracies at any paper I have worked at, left, right, otherwise.
     
  12. Bubbler

    Bubbler Well-Known Member

    People have ALWAYS thought newspapers sucked. Just like lawyers suck.

    The only valid point I hear in any of this noise is the cut in space. Aside from that, it's pretty much the same old shit you've always heard.
     
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