'What if the newspaper industry made a colossal mistake?'

It's the way some people try to save their own ass. An online example would be, "let's increase traffic by 10 percent this year!" I'm not going to articulate this correctly, but how do you know you haven't already maxed out your readership? There comes a point where every product reaches its peak. And what kind of traffic do you hope to gain? Uniques? More engagement from regular visitors? How will that benefit the bottom line?

 

I'm calling complete Bullshit on this post.

I asked you for the names of the three newspapers that wanted to charge you this ridiculous rate and you conveniently disappeared from the thread. Now man up, admit you're full of bullshit, or provide the names of the three papers.

 

SHENANIGANS!

 

To stop worrying about the Internet the newspaper industry needs to find the next cool-sounding, futuristic idea that will never ever break even. It won't change things but a whole new bunch of buzz words will make for a - temporarily - refreshing change.

Drones delivering the morning edition anyone?

 

Can we try newsletters again?

 

A lot of places are. Welcome back to 2005.

 

We've done so many other things to hurt the print product that have nothing to do with digital and everything to do with saving money:

• We've made the paper smaller, both in page count and physical size (readers notice they're paying more for less)
• We've added other print products such as magazines and special books (asking the same, finite advertising base to give us more and more ... they must notice)
• We've had layoffs and furloughs, which have stretched staffs thin, making for less local content or certainly less in-depth content
• We've slashed budgets, limiting travel for things like sports, shrinking our radius of coverage
• We've gone to hub layout systems, which have made for more mistakes by taking away a lot of institutional memory and local control from newsrooms (in our case, it's also moved up deadlines and prevented us from having meaningful agate in our paper)
• Our shop was actually hired to deliver the closest metro paper to our area, which also pushed up our deadlines to the point that, in a few rare cases, the metro our carriers were delivering had fresher late sports in it than our own paper (kind of embarrassing ... and when I asked about it, I was told that we should be lucky to have that contract or our newsroom would be more of a skeleton crew than it already is)

Sometimes I think there's a mentality that print readers won't notice that the print edition isn't the same as it was 5, 10, 15 years ago and that as long as they're receiving something, they'll be happy. Then they blame the web and other outside factors when they see that circulation has dropped 30% (or whatever the number might be) in 20 years.

 

Why would someone make that up? That's a pretty specific number to pull out of your ass.

When my dad died a couple years ago, it was approaching $1,000 for a death notice in two metros, and he didn't have much of one. It's one of the few growing revenue sources. I'm not surprised the number could be that high.

 

Easy, tiger.

I didn't, and won't, name the newspapers publicly because I don't want to out myself.

They're East Coast papers and here's the breakdown:

-- Major (probably 175,000ish circ) metro wanted $1,700.
-- Midsize (40,000-50,000 circ) metro wanted $800.
-- Local rag (probably less than 20,000) wanted $600.

That's $3,100.

 

A lot of things on Kato's list have bothered me, but this was a silent killer. Local knowledge is stripped away, and leads to presentation without any "soul" to it. The regional hubs don't know what's important to the publications they're producing.

 

How convenient.

How about naming the metro and the mid-size so I can actually check their rates? Keep the local rag to yourself and you don't get outed.

 

I can see a high price for a metro. But a mid-size charging $800 and a local rag charging $600 for 200 words? I ain't buying it.