Inland Empire implosion

Your post said it all. This is the death of journalism in a nutshell. Just study this one newspaper. Anybody who has hope for the business? Cmon. Just consider this newspaper's plight.

 

Doc you know better than this.
So preps do not attract the eyes and the clicks that the pros do? Hmmm. What has changed over the years? I'll tell you what has changed. Newspapers commitment to preps. Newspapers commitment to staffing. Newspapers deciding to hire the dregs of the sales society to run their ad selling departments. What has not changed?? Names make news. Names sell. Mommy, dad, auntie, uncle, granny want to read about the kids ... still.
But we've given up and won't even try to take their money. Do you know any people who film sporting events or dance recitals of little Johnny and Julie? I know a guy who makes so much money filming dance recitals and selling the tapes he's rolling in dough. But newspapers gave up on preps for obvious reasons. The suits at corporate ... prettymuch all they do is figure ways to cut staff. Finally they got to preps and they just said, 'Well we have been trying all these years to keep covering everythign. Something's got to go and nobody gives a shit about preps. We just won't cover them anymore."
The suits don't care bout preps. they care about the pros. So bye bye preps and the prep dollar$$$$$$$.
Good job suits. Good job ad departments. See u in the unemployment line. Oh wait, the suits have made nuff money to retire comfortably.

 

Sorry, but we'll just agree to disagree.

Preps is a very small and limited audience. Pros cater to all sports fan. Ever heard of the Super Bowl? Well 111,300,000 people watched it last year. And the reason newspapers quit "caring" and quit staffing all these high school events is because circulation rates have dropped so dramatically since the explosion of the Internet and social media, that newspapers can't afford to keep that many employees on the payroll.

You really don't understand the business side of this business. I don't necessarily like what's happened, but I understand why and where it's headed. Preps is the last thing I'd concentrate on if I were a publisher for a mid-size or larger. There's no money in it.

 

It wasn't more than four years ago that OCR was very proud to say it covered and photographed EVERY high school football game involving county teams. That was about 100 schools.

 

Thanks for the post, Doc. I understand why nobody is covering preps anymore. I realize they have had to cut so many bodies they finally gave up on preps. But I do think there's a market to make money covering grandkids' games.

 

Everyone I know can't stand high school sports unless it involves their kid. They wouldn't read about someone else's grandkid if you paid them to. The point is, the market is extremely limited. If you have two basketball teams with 10 kids that play, that's grandparents and momma and daddy for 10 kids. Considering that you would not sell an individual paper to each one of them, but maybe just maybe sell one per household, that would be three papers per kid or 30 total papers. Even if they were all divorced and had another set of parents or grandparents, that would only be 60 papers. At $1 per paper, that's $60. Hardly enough to pay for the labor that went into covering and publishing the story. You can expand it by using baseball and football examples but unless you get every football players name in the paper doing something of significance, it's just not going to sell. You are way out of your element here buddy. If the Dallas Morning News or the Seattle Times focused on preps like you say, they'd be finished in a matter of months.

 

Wasn't this during the OCR's "screw online, print will save us!" era?

 

You are a smart guy, Doc. I like your style
First of all, papers are more than a dollar these days. Way more than a dollar. I still say if ad staffs were worth ANYTHING they could use the preps to sell ads. Everybody located near a high school wants to support the high school. Advertisers will support kids.

 

Of course, part of the context for this discussion is the huge debt load that these chains are carrying. When you've got to make your vig every quarter.... and make your CEO fabulously wealthy.... there's no room for that 35-grand-a-year preps reporter.

 

1. You act like Mom & Pop stores are still a thing, and that people still rally around good old Hometeam High and Friday nights. That's just not reality for most of the world.

2. Your plan is to hope ad staffs can sell based on an emotional appeal, rather than a business decision about how to most effectively spend ad dollars.

Seems reasonable. ....