Register lays off longtime columnist

Sadly, I heard Randy was a victim of webhits. He didn't have enough so he got laid off. In many of the idiotic moves the register (lower case intentional) has done, this is one of the tops. You are trying to be a local paper and you get rid of the one guy who was wired into the county like no other. Brilliant! I give the paper four years before it gets folded into the Pennysaver.

 

So did I.

 

Not a fan of Page 2's in general. But a fan of Randy's and completely agree with those pointint out the institutional (local) knowledge that just got thrown overboard. One more in a long line of newspaper folks who are better than the organizations that shed them.

 

The OC Register lost its heart and soul many years ago.

 

I'm old school, I'm a Randy fan from when I lived out there, and it's past time to say I'm sad of what has happened to the Southern California papers, and papers in general. But ...

This business of not enough web readers is going to be a factor in the future, like it or not. In the old days, you put writers in the paper, and except for focus groups and surveys or whatever, you simply assumed on faith that people were reading them. Even when a paper hired a huge name like Lupica, it was decidedly unscientific as to whether he added 50,000 readers or whatever, although I'm sure there were indications.

These days, you can break down who's reading what every single day, which authors, which column subjects, whatever. Exact numbers, and in relation to all the others.

So this is going to be the question (and I truly mean it as a question, not a rhetorical one to which I presume I have the answer). Let's say you've got a veteran guy, making a relatively high amount of money, and on a typical day, the numbers for the things he writes lag what 10 other writers are writing, and a single column ranks 57th on the breakdown of things people read that day.

I'll tell you my current answer: That that writer still serves a valuable role, that newspaper (or website) readership is a cobbled-together total of a lot of smaller things, and that there's a human factor too.

But if you're simply the people running the business, and the person making the most money in your department is writing the 57th-most-read story for your newspaper/website on a daily basis, what do you do about that?

I don't have an answer. But the notion that somebody is being read doesn't have to be taken on faith anymore; you've got hard numbers right in front of you.

So now what?

 

"Web hits" are like getting a report card every day, and that sucks.
And probably what isn't considered is the impact that even the 57th most-read column can have when it deals with a specific topic, such as golf. I bet on a given day, golf ad revenue is more than 57th among all the ads in the paper/website.

 

A damn good point.

 

The only thing fucktard bean counters give a shit about is the bottom line.

They couldn't care less about the reader until the circulation numbers drop. Then they look for scapegoats everywhere but the place they should be looking.

 

I think web readers and newspaper readers are not always the same people with the same interests. Low web hits are not necessarily an indication that Randy wasn't being read on newsprint.

I have seen market surveys in which some of a paper's columnists, often the No. 2 sports guy but in two instances it was our No. 1, had astonishingly low recognition among readers. At one place it was a guy who'd been the No. 2 sports columnist for something like 20 years. He was a bit meek, but not unreadable. Decades later, I still am not sure how it would have been possible that only 20 percent of that paper's readers knew his name.

I'd be surprised if that were the case with Randy. If you lived in the OC for more than a few months and didn't know who he was, you didn't like sports.

 

Based on the comments in this board, some of you might be interested in reading what I wrote the other day about my brother's departure from the Register.

http://owenyoungman.com/2012/03/01/sliding-away/

Thanks,

Owen Youngman

 

Another huge factor in online hits is how the story/column is played on the website. I know some newspapers with columnists or beats that are damn near impossible to find unless you navigate around for a minute or two. Unless you're REALLY interested in that team/columnist and know what you're looking for, you're not clicking on that story.

And also - if we're going to start making decisions solely on web hits, we might as well toss out the 1A section at some papers. The things that get hits in my experience: photo galleries, obits, sudoku, sports. Things like city government, crime beat, etc., lag behind.

I remember one day I had a notebook on State U that had a few interesting football tidbits but nothing spectacular. It had more web hits than a breaking story about the city's mayor WHO HAD JUST DIED. Blew me away.