Plain Dealer Indians writers will only cover "select" road trips

Customers may say that, but that's not the reason they stopped buying the newspaper.

 

The reason people DO still buy the paper has nothing to do with its quality or what gets covered and what doesn't. It has everything to do with force of habit, or a streak of masochism.

 

Of course. They stopped buying it, as I've argued time and again, because they can get information for free now. Can they get the same information? Not necessarily. But "free" often outweighs "relevant to me" in the balancing.

 

You could make the newspaper free and I doubt it would make many more people take it.

 

Good point. I should add that the cost isn't just the financial one. It's a poor delivery system. Also, and I think this is what you're also getting at, there's less reason to get the local paper, even the online version, when news a la carte is now available.

 

What's the average age of a newspaper subscriber? It's got to be older than subscribers to the opera.

There really is no scenario where the paper grows its dead tree subscription base.

 

And, again, in an age in which revenue is short, if news is to continue to generate profit, it seems that expending man hours covering a baseball team (or a basketball or football or hockey team) when every damn pitch is tracked in real time down to the spin rate of the baseball and the "exit velocity" of the batted ball, is eventually going to be a practice that falls by the wayside.

And I'm not just talking about road coverage.

 

I know it's pretty old, but I can't find an exact number.

I did, however, find this: Newspapers: Daily Readership by Age

In the last 15 years, even the percentage of seniors 65 and older who read the daily newspaper has fallen by 20 percentage points.

The dropoffs in other age groups are higher, but are around 30 percentage points for the 45-54 and 55-64 groups as well.

 

Declining readership and print advertising have been problems for the last 10-15 years, but in the past year or so, our shop has had incredible problems actually delivering the paper to subscribers. And as recent threads about Boston's delivery problems show, we're not alone.

Again, if there was any way to just break even financially without the print product, newspapers would have done it already.

 

Just curious, having spent most of my life on the West Coast and, knowing how bottom-line the business has become, how many papers in the Eastern and Central time zones are holding space in the dead tree edition for West Coast night games anyway? A 7:15 start in San Francisco, I would think, would require prayers and burnt sacrifices for a 3-hour game.

 

The papers around here will hold for about a 10-inch story that can be sent when the horn goes off.

 

Holding for what? Away games of the local team on the West Coast or just games in general? We generally just run early notes and push to the web for late West Coast games, and no way we're bothering getting in MLB boxes for them at this point. Deadlines have just gotten too absurd.