Oregonian newsroom set to cut 70

There's no doubt ad revenue is the only thing keeping the printing press rolling. Obviously, management would ditch the costly printing plant (and the workers who make it run) in a heartbeat if they could.

One problem with internet advertising — besides convincing advertisers to use it — is once you sell all the spaces on your web site's home page, various links, blogs, etc., it's not that easy to "add pages" to accommodate more advertising. Much easier to do that with print.

And we haven't even mentioned inserts yet.

 

Um, what? Adding space for web advertising is about the easiest thing in the world. That's what ad rotators are for. And "adding pages" in print typically means "That extra page for sports we just gave you, its gone now...we'll give you two extra pages in an issue to make up for it mid-July because you'll be just as busy then right?"

 

A main issue with going all online is that anyone could put together a website. It's hard for someone to compete with even the Podunk Press, because it's going to cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to buy a press or pay to print even a small paper.

Someone in their mom's basement could easily compete with the Podunk Online, though.

 

Someone in their mom's basement also could compete easily with the Podunk Press. Print is competing against anything that takes away people's eyeballs (that sounds gross, doesn't it?).

Or better yet, someone could compete against one beat that attracts people to the Podunk Press. To crossthread, I don't know that the Washington Post is quaking in its shoes over the guy getting contributions to cover the Nationals, but to paraphrase an old DC saying, if you lose 200 readers here and 200 readers there, it starts to add up to real readership decline.

 

Exactly, if someone only reads the WaPo for its Nats coverage, or only reads the Podunk Press for its coverage of local city hall issues, and someone online starts doing it just as well, if not better, and is charging either nothing or next to nothing, what reason do they have to pay a yearly subscription to the paper?

 

And when those layoffs hit the Oregonian, we will all be well-versed in the benefits of going to an all-Web format.

As for the Oregonian posting for a sports reporter, I'm 99.9942% certain that's not accurate. But I've been wrong before.

 

Someone told me that two very big people in sports offered to take the buyout but were rejected.

 

That buyout is all of Newhouse, not just the Oregonian.