Huh, ain't that something ... Should newspapers abandon digital?

I'm in a similar situation. It's similar for most of the guys around here too -- even the area's big metro has its beat writer for the big state football program record videos and shoot his own photos. They don't care about the quality of the product, though. The management people I've talked to at my company and others have made it clear they only care about one thing: clicks. They want as many page views as possible for as cheap as possible. They want an article with photos that links to a separate photo gallery and a video. Pay three people (or two) to do those functions properly? Forget that! Why pay three people when one can do it? So as a result, I juggle a DSLR, an HD camcorder, and a cell phone to tweet all while taking notes and following a game. As a result of producing a gamer with photos, separate photo gallery and video all on deadline, it's all mediocre.

 

To me, this is maybe the biggest problem with the industry. A mindset that saving money is more important than overall quality. When in fact, spreading employees so thin not only affects the quality, it also affects the bottom line because people aren't going to continue to pay for a product that's getting worse in quality.

 

As Dick wrote, people just don't want to pay and they don't need to in order to get their "news fix."

 

As a bonus, the higher-ups gripe and wonder why you have so much overtime.

 

The fear, I believe, isn't that inserts will stop. It's that they can be delivered by some other means than newspapers that will allow them to target potential customers more accurately.

 

Fuck that dude. If my bosses ever ask me to do all that shit, I'm out. You're either too young and too dumb to realize what an ass raping you're taking or you're just fucking crazy. Sorry, maybe I over-reacted. It's nothing personal. I just sure as fuck wouldn't do that. Neither should you.

 

And don't forget the BLOG!

 

Mediocre?? Well, you are just not doing your job! We'll find somebody who can do it better. You just aren't cutting it. Kidding ... I'm just saying what your management will say. You should be able to do everything well!! And you damn well better not put down overtime.

 

A lot of people would have kept paying had the newspaper they were used to, not turned to shit. The way to win them back? Well, the baby boomers enjoy newspapers. Many boomers dropped their subscriptions when their newspapers turned to shit. Almost all papers did cut their product in half. The way to win them back is beef the newspapers back up a bit, have some promotions to get the Boomers back. Then you go after the young people. Local names make news. I realize it's probably too late but you folks saying people don't want or need a newspaper are wrong. Many boomers reluctantly dropped their subscriptions during the 5 years or so of declining product (favorite writers, features, comics shrinking or being eliminated). Why should they pay for crap? In reality most of them like reading a newspaper; their decision to abandon papers was made easy by Gannett and companies that sliced their pages to shreds. You'd have to be an idiot to subscribe to most newspapers nowadays -- product sucks compared to the past and readers know it!!!!

 

Kind of off beat from the rest of this thread, but I saw this and wanted to reply.


The thing with podcasts is the overhead is so small, so a niche audience can still work. All you're paying for is man hours (a 20-minute guest interview podcast should take about 90 minutes of your time to set up, produce, edit, post and share to social medias) and $5 to $10 a month on whatever third-party site you're hosting the files (if any).

If you can sell a live-read sponsorship to a business wanting to support HS sports for, say, $150 an episode, you're bringing in a decent direct profit. Obviously not something that can keep the lights on and paper printing, but certainly not a failure.

We sell our weekly HS football one for $75, which is too low. Even that returns a (very tiny) direct profit. Of course, you hope to attract new visitors to the website and eventually more clicks, online subscriptions and digital advertisers.

 

Nah.

The paper got smaller because people stopped reading it, not the other way around.

Millennials, in particular, are simply not going to pay for newspapers. Not if they have any other option for their information fix. And they also hate clutter. They don't want newspapers arriving every day, adding to their "stuff." They aren't accumulators.

 

We are now getting some inserts sans newspaper.