What Newspapers Really Want

Right, "the suits" are conspiring to kill newspapers. But "the suits" are still buying printing presses, which aren't cheap. San Francisco, about as wired a place as you'll find, will be printing on new ones the middle of next year. The New York Daily News recently ordered new ones. Smaller papers are buying, too. Hearst just announced it's spending $60 million for new presses for Albany. Business isn't as good as it was in the 1990s for press manufacturers, but they are still alive.

I think the truth is that no one's got a grip on the future and "the suits" are as surprised by the past year as anyone.

 

After all papers go the Web route, here's the likely solution for folks (us guys) who want to read the paper sitting on the throne:
There will be a fairly inexpensive monitor screen (with a wireless connection) that you can install on the wall across from The Throne. Using a remote control, you can scroll through the daily offerings of your "paper" as you take care of bidness.

 

Yes. Perhaps they could call it a "laptop," and the remote control device could be called a "mouse."

 

When I got into this business five years ago, people told me the quickest path to the most money was to be a copy editor/desiger, because nobody wanted those jobs. But I've got to think -- and I base this largely on what has happened at my shop -- that the more online we get, the less necessary copy editors and designers are.

There are (hopefully) some writing jobs that are safe. Somebody local is always going to have to cover the Green Bay Packers or Nebraska football or the St. Louis Cardinals. It's just that, because there eventually will be no press deadlines, a couple of copy editors can handle the entire load, as opposed to, say, six of them. And with no paper to produce, one designer per staff should suffice.

So they key in the new world is to have a beat that is not expendable.

 

Trouble is, we don't have beats. Our employers have beats, and they allow or tell us to cover them for some period of time. But once you get a few raises or a few years older or a little resistant to doing more (blogs, 24/7 writing for Web site, audio, video) for less (raises, time with your family, opportunities for advancement), the employers will take the beat away from you and give it to someone else. With the overall disregard being shown for institutional knowledge, it's no big deal to take the longtime Packers guy off that beat and stick some kid onto it who is earning 60 percent as much. Readers time and again haven't shown much savvy or preference for the veteran writers, and even if they did, bosses would ignore it.

So it's true that someone will have to cover the Packers or Nebraska football or the Cardinals. But there's no assurance that, even if that's you today, it will be you tomorrow.

 

It will never work. One advantage newsprint has is its use as an emergency substitute when the roll is empty.

 

I don't think the suits in our company care one bit about print or online or serving the community, whatever.

Their one goal is to please Wall Street -- to have enough on the bottom line of all their frickin' reports that we constantly have to send them that shows we're making a hefty profit for the investment group that oversees our company.

If we sell calendars (which our ad staff has had to), put out a newspaper, give haircuts, turn our shop into a garden center -- I don't think anyone at the top cares as long as they are bleeding this turnip dry of all the cash they can.

Quality doesn't matter. Having the right staff doesn't matter. Press awards don't matter. Doing good journalism doesn't matter. The bottom line IS ALL THAT MATTERS to these folks. And it will remain that way as long as newspaper/media companies are tied to Wall Street...

 

I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but at my paper, when we've hired younger people to replace older people, it has usually been because the older people took better gigs at the same newspaper.

Now, this isn't true of copy editors. When those people leave or move up (rare), they simply don't replace them. That will never happen with the franchise beats, and that was my point.

 

I'm far from an expert and I may completely show my ignorance here, but I have a theory on the issue of ad revenue and the Web. On the Web, advertisers can learn exactly what percentage of the consuming populace is really noticing their advertising. There's no equivalent for hit counts in print. And once they get a quantative look, they won't necessarily pay what they pay in print, where there is no metric. Thoughts?

 

Just because and ad is on a web page doesn't mean it's viewed. Same as a print ad.
What Madison Ave. wants is market penetration. You need to show your product is available to xxx,xxx people, ages xx-xx. That is xx% of the town/county. And xx% of each age bracket.
That is what advertisers want.

 

Amen, brother.