How important is the sports section to the paper?

Though it's a national paper, the Journal also wants to compete locally with the Times. You've got to give sports some attention if you want to do that.

As it is, a sports fan who works on Wall Street has to read the Journal and the Post or the News. he'd gladly give up the tabloid if the Journal had a good sports section.

 

A test for you, Dick. It's harder to do than it once was, but it's still plausible.
In the airport, at a gate, pick up a newspaper that's been discarded.
Check to see what sections are there.
In my experience 99 percent of the time the sports section is gone. That's always said it all to me. You'll find business, life, front page, etc. The sports is almost ALWAYS gone.

 

just a scientific study on how gamblers troll airports for racing forms and betting lines....

 

Not too damn important, based on the space gods at our place. Cut all to hell this time of year, when we're busy but the paper is in the fourth quarter budget panic, but all kinds of space in the dead of summer.

Naturally, the reader assumes the sports department determines the size of the sports section.

 

I think it depends what one's interest is. There are some people who NEVER read sports and others who ONLY read sports. Judging by the number of calls/emails I get, someone is reading it.

Confesssion time: I rarely read the other sections of our paper. Maybe once a week. They're good quality sections, but just not anything I'm really interested in.

 

This also is true. It's very telling that they need sports coverage to do so.

 

The true answer is almost unknowable because of the prevailing newsroom culture. The news side folks, who are doing IMPORTANT WORK, are the ones who craft the rare and mostly unscientific readership studies. They write the questions to elicit a certain response -- "check this box if you read this section" or somesuch, and 80 percent say the local section and 40 percent say sports. You never see a question phrased "If we removed any of the following sections, would you continue to subscribe?"

 

At bigger papers, readership surveys are usually conducted by the internal marketing department or farmed out to a marketing firm. Unless it's a "just for fun, let's put a survey in the paper and fill space" type of thing, a newsroom almost never would conduct such a survey and consider it remotely accurate, except at a smaller paper.

 

Oh, for what it's worth, I'm sure I would not be allowed to subscribe to the newspaper by my wife if it did not have coupons in it.

The bigger debate should be if ads and coupons were taken out.

 

Yes and the A-section always has the most readers because they consider someone a reader if you have glanced at a headline, which you can hardly avoid.

 

Good point.

It's odd, however, that sports books, for example, don't sell. And that World Series games can't compete in the ratings with, say, "Dancing With the Stars."

Something about a newspaper and sports fans. The format appeals to them.

 

I've worked at two pretty big papers, and in both cases the top editors were integrally involved with the marketing department in creating and conducting the research.