The New Orleans Times-Picayune May Reduce Frequency of Publication -- NY Times

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/new-orleans-paper-said-to-face-deep-cuts-and-may-cut-back-on-publication/?smid=tw-nytimestv&seid=auto

 

I was about to post this

Said the model is the Ann Arbor News. But I thought it was web only now.

 

Well, they did reduce publication frequency...

 

The traditional business model of using classified and disply advertising revenue to pay salaries and other expenses is failing over and over. What the future holds is anyone's guess.

 

I think this has been the real danger of the Internet publishing thing - Companies now have hard data on how few people actually click on ads. For years, it was just a given that people looked at advertisements in print newspapers, but it's somewhat hard to believe that the clickthru on the Internet is so drastically different than the penetration rate of a print product.

 

Pay walls, of course. Web ads won't do it.

 

Holy shit. A city NOLA's size without a real daily paper? Doomed. All of us. Doomed.

 

Ya know, Inky, up until recently, I honestly thought - and hoped - smaller papers like the one I work for now might weather this perfect storm. But not now; I agree with you. Doomed. Not today or tomorrow, but eventually, yes.

 

I live in the region and know a lot of quality Picayune folks so this is a real punch in the gut. I literally feel sick reading this.

As far as online ad revenue, papers have been really slow in adapting a new model of how to sell ads. They still want a single ad for a single product and aren't targeting niches at cheaper rates, but more concentrated audiences. This site (SportsJournalists.com) is more efficient. I was just looking at making reservations for a vacation trip earlier tonight and now I'm looking at a strip ad for Choice Hotels under the text box I'm typing in. Online advertising isn't about selling a double truck for Macy's.

Now, I do understand that you still won't get the same bang for your buck as you did when your newspaper was the most efficient way for a local business to get its message out. But I've found that, in this regard, many newspapers haven't even started to grasp survival skills in the New Age.

The other part, of course, is the pay wall. I think newspapers are just figuring out that the goals of maximizing audience for advertisers and finding a paying audience for unique content aren't mutually exclusive ideas.

Unfortunately, the business is discovering this too late.

 

damn it.

some really good folks there.

 

Someone told me they had a hiring freeze for the past couple years but I saw a part-time reporter opening on jjobs maybe 8 months ago, so who knows.

They don't have a pay wall, but there are people in the city who would pay to read the online stuff. There is certainly a pride that locals have for the city, and for the paper. Even younger people in their 20s and 30s and they visit nola.com each day. Would you lose some with a pay wall? Probably, but I still believe many would fork it up.

What I have heard (I grew up there and my parents still live there), they don't even have an e-edition version of the paper. That could be incorrect, but if it's true, then it's ridiculous.

It's sad, too. That's my hometown paper, one I read each day growing up. Not to put the nail in the coffin since this is just a "maybe," but it's still grim nonetheless. I've always felt the T-P did one thing better than any other news outlet in Louisiana or the Mississippi Gulf Coast: the Saints. They cover/covered the hell out of that franchise.

I visited the Website for the first time in a few days and the design looks different. Looks much..."louder" than before. I went to nj.com and it's the old style (the way nola.com used to look).

 

Newhouse closed The Ann Arbor News - Yeah, I was one of the people who lost their job. The company opened AnnArbor.com, hiring far fewer people for far less pay (at least from what I saw). The site is updated every day, but I believe it's just twice a week for print - not sure because I don't live in the circulation area. The print product was produced by a sister paper, the Jackson Citizen Patriot, until MLive consolidated desk operations in Grand Rapids.