Sam Zell Has a Plan

Last chain I worked for in Michigan is now striving for a 70/30 split and the editorial ain't gittin the 70....

 

Write shorter, not harder.

 

That's one of the dumbest ideas I've ever read about. So, according to Michaels, a reporter is considered productive by the length of the stories? (I thought management considered the wave of the future to be shorter stories because readers didn't have the attention span for anything longer than 6 inches?)

How does he figure that the average journalist produces X number of pages. Is that the amount of inches written? What about copy editors? Is he counting the number of pages designed? You might get a copy editor designing 1A, while another editor does six pages with 80 percent newshole. Are they counting pages?

Some of these corporate types need to spend a few days in a newsroom to see what really goes on.

 

Good luck with that. They printing on postage stamps?

 

I think they have.
I think that it is very true, that the smaller the paper, the higher the byline count is for reporters.
And the point is that if you are producing a ton of copy, then you don't have any worries. I imagine they are totaling the copy inches to get the page count number.
Inch count is a better measure anyway. You might have one byline, and that looks bad, but it might have been 166 inches of copy, then that is the same as doing 8 20-inch stories.
But if you're out in a bureau and your stuff only gets in every so often, then you might have a problem. Or if you are on a beat that doesn't generate a lot of stories, you might have a problem.
Otherwise, you're okay.

 

I'd rather have a busy bee churning out five stories a day by changing adjectives in press releases than some bottom-line-draining drone spending a week to get one measly story in the paper about corruption at city hall.

 

I'd hate to be answering phones the first day those right-sized papers appear.

"Why is there 20 pages missing from my paper?"
"Why does my paper feel so much thinner?"

People do notice these things. The first few thousand canceled subscriptions may make Zell and company rethink this "strategy".

 

People answering phones are a waste. They'll be the first to go. They have voicemail and computers for that now. You will never be a publisher, pal.

 

One thing about my former sportswriting career. I met a good number of really successful businesspeople. They were smart. None of them ever said "we'll give them less, charge them more, and they'll lap it up."
Newspapers, airlines, they're both reacting to the fact people have alternatives by saying, "If that's the way you feel, fuck you! We'll REALLY start ripping you off now!"
Is there some income limit above which the human brain ceases to function?

 

I love the phrase "customer-centric" design. What that really means is design that takes up no more than 1/2 a page and isn't on an open page free from advertising because those are D-E-A-D dead dead dead.

 

Though many might be amused by the prospect, trust me . . . Sam Zell ain't going broke in my lifetime, and I figure I have at least fifteen years left.

 

Dear BH: A clarification. Zell's newspaper business will be broke, and he'll dump it.