Plain Dealer staff goes on offensive to save paper.

Depends how strong the guild is, I suppose, but that has not been the recent history at other union papers. It's all subjective in most places, unless there's something like the Boston Globe had with many older employees still operating under the lifetime guarantee.

 

Our sports section is horrible at the amount of space every day that is devoted to "look at what's on our website!" In fact, sometimes they'll even remove something from print so they can refer to it being online.

A copy editor even asked the editor once about how effective it was to use all that space on website refs that say the same thing day in and day out, and the editor said there's no way of knowing but that it's something we needed to do anyway.

An eye-rolling space waster that was implemented was to publish a "tweet of the day" every day in our section from one of our reporters.

 

The worst thing you can do is turn something like that into furniture, where it looks more or less the same and is in the same spot every day. Readers basically look right past that type of thing. If you're highlighting Web-only content in your print edition, you need to do a good job explaining why that unique thing is worth dropping the print product for a second, grabbing a computer and looking at. Even so, it won't lead to many hits or sustained hits.