State of the News Media 2007

silvercharm, you're right. sports section is never there. and I'm willing to bet without prep sports, depending on the size/circulation of your newspaper, that 13 percent figure would be even lower. People eat up prep sports. Parents will buy 5 newstand copies on any given day for the grandparents, the frame on the wall, the scrapbook, etc, etc.

And until profit margins dip to single digits, I'll worry more. Hell, when profit margins dip to 12, 13 percent, I'll worry. Fact is, newspapers are still making nice profits, and newspapers are finally finding profits out of the Internet. If anything, all these job cuts are gonna hurt circulations because readers are going to see the quality of their paper going down the shitter.

 

I think it is bad.
In the last five years, between 11-13% of our positions were eliminated. And, the positions hired on the backside of those trims are fraction-salary positions. Call it correction. Call it doomsday, fact is there are fewer newspapermen and women then there were five years ago.

 

Oh no, that's not what I meant. It's definitely bad that all these positions are being eliminated, and God forbid I lose my job. I'm just saying the future of the industry or newspapers' ability to profit is not as nearly as bad as it's made out to be.

Yeah, I worry about how many more cuts mgt thinks it needs to make in the newsroom. Sure, there were - and in some cases, still are - plenty of newsrooms with bloated staff. Our paper is in that boat, even in sports to a degree despite the fact we've not replaced four positions. But mgt shouldn't be eliminating jobs until just a bare bone staff is left. Like the studies suggest, our ability to do enterprising, policy-changing investigative journalism takes a huge hit, and the daily quality of the newshole takes a huge hit, and THAT, in my opinion, is going to hurt the industries' ability to keep up those profit margins. Instead of eliminating all these jobs, shift some of those people over to full-time Web site work for the newspaper. Noooo, they want us to do our regular jobs, plus post to the Web every hour, plus maintain a blog, and do all this with 20 percent less staffing hours, wage freezes and in some cases pay cuts. It's ludicrous how poorly of a job ownerships are doing of investing in their products effectively.

 

I think preps people get a distorted sense of reader interest because they are immersed in it; these are the only people they talk to. When people find out what I do, they usually want to talk sports, but since I stopped covering preps 25 years ago, I can count the times on one hand when they wanted to talk about high school sports. You can't judge reader interest by what you hear from parents attending a high school football game.

 

What bothers me is that we no longer have time for issue stories in the paper. On the radio, people rant. ESPN gets the talking heads going at it. But as for the kind of reporting that ferrets out these issues, staffs are so stretched that there's no time for a reporter to write them and no editor with time to assist.

And we think people don't notice. The NYT is doing OK, and not that we all want to be the Times, but enterprise accounted for its most-read stories online last year. People ask me about enterprise I did years ago, but nobody remembers the local fan reaction stories. But that stuff is what a lot of papers are into now that we've all gone hyper-local.

 

Original, unique content is the future for newspapers. Problem is, it is expensive. Very expensive.
How many staffs in America could devout two star reporters to ONE story for four months?
That's what it took for the Washington Post to uncover unsatisfactory care of Veterans at Walter Reed.
We affect change. That is why I started in this business. Whether it is how a prep basketball tournament is run or prompting Congressional hearings, we affect change.
There are fewer of us to do it. Not intending to be philosophical, but our society is hurt by us not being there.
Until someone recognizes it, this industry has nicked its vein.

 

i'm thinking the problem of newspapers has to do with the sad fact that they just are an inefficient method for processing information. and i'm not referring to the costs of printing and trucking.

with the web, you think of what you need and go find it.

with the newspaper somebody else thinks of what you might need and force feeds it to you.

on a given morning, over your coffee, you may want to know about one or two things - troop levels and the AL Central pennant race. But there's your paper, with 50 pages of OTHER stuff - new trends in hip-hop music, affordable housing in the warehouse district, etc. all extraneous information. and you ignore it. and yet that information required much labor and resources to produce. with the assumption it will find an end user. but it didn't find you. and then it goes into the recycle bin or trash can, and then, two weeks later, if you want to know about new trends in hip-hop music, it's not there.

it's not an efficient response to market needs, or to the impulses of the human brain.

but, when all those "useless" stories become part of an internet database - accessable at any time - when the whim strikes you - now they are efficient information.

paper is nice to hold, but it doesn't fit with the impulsive needs of your brain. it's profoundly obsolete - and yet i love the fact that i can retrieve any information i want - at any time - from databases.

 

It's simple. Sell more advertising. Don't take no for an answer.

 

This is perhaps the best explanation I've ever heard as to why the newspaper industry (as it currently exists) is doomed.

 

This rings true for a segment of our population, the one that knows exactly what it wants. But that can be fixed fairly easily: an extensive index that literally lists every story in the paper that day, much like you'd find in the front of a magazine.

But there's also another segment of our population, one that wants to be told what's important and what's not. If you want to know what the most important news of the day is, you don't want to have to hunt for it. In that regard, the newspaper front page is still the most efficient way to put it out, because you can get multiple stories that reach the reader's eye at the same time. Plus flipping through pages is far more intuitive and quicker than scrolling down the home page or following links.

The internet can force us to tweak the product, and that's probably a good thing. I certainly don't agree, as sartean wrote, that it means the industry is doomed.

 

Ouestion for the board:

How many of you regularly (or even occasionally) click on ads, whether it's on newspaper sites, ESPN.com, or even SportsJournalists.com?

I never do.

I can't really pinpont any one reason why other than I just never got into the habit of doing so. Early on (when pop-ups were more of a nuisance) I simply regarded ads as something that was in the way and something to ignore or get off my screen if possible.

Yet I read newspaper ads all the time. I even look for them sometimes.

 

Throwing another angle in, just for fun:

I live in a market with two major metropolitan newspapers. One of those papers puts out one of those free youth-oriented tabs. I see lots of people -- not all of them particularly young -- reading the tab. I see very few people reading the two major metros.

As an ex-newspaper guy who was ready to dismiss the free tab as Newspaper Lite, I find myself picking it up more often than not. Turns out, it's quite good -- lots of short, easy reads, some good writing, a solid dose of attitude (without overdoing it.)

Why is that publication so good? I'm going to guess it's because it has a small staff, few layers of editing and a clear idea of what its audience is. Any other thoughts?