Will Other Newspapers Follow Into The "3 Days a Week!" Publishing Cycle?

Aren't the terms "buzz reporter" and "community engagement specialists" just nice names for aggregator?

 

Do we know that's what the buzz reporter does? The one ad I saw in the Huntsville thread indicated reporting. Lot of paying attention to metrics and social media engagements and artificially spiking interest in your story by constantly talking on the comments thread (there's a less polite name for this in certain corners of the Internet). But still reporting. Sure, the product is going to suck assorted animal genitalia of varying degrees of cleanliness in the short term, and god only knows what they're cooking up for the long term, but at least they're making a passing attempt to cover things in this new guise. This P-I thing isn't that. But I'll defer to Seattle peeps to provide more info on that front.

 

Vinyl-worshipping hipster.

 

Hey, I didn't know you had the new Rush album on vinyl ...

Seriously, I thought of this thread today when our ME mentioned at the news budget meeting, "Remember when AP used to move a Readers Under 35 budget?"

This led to a discussion of how, for many of us, newspapers used to fret about finding ways to reel in the younger readers.

These days, we're desperately trying to hang on to the baby boomers. The under-35 crowd was written off years ago.

 

The baby boomers are dropping subscriptions as well. Most boomers don't care for pictures of cute kids or puppies on the front page. I don't know what dimwit of an editor or publisher thinks those standalones work to attract readers.

Most people younger than 60 can at least navigate the web and get to the news they want, which makes paying for print an needless expense.

 

I'm over 60 and my Internet skills are just fine, thank you. But I still prefer a print edition for a single-sitting relatively long read to get the news. It just feels more convenient to me, whether it is or not. If there's something I read I want more information on, then it's off the Web I go.

 

The picture of a phonograph that Piotr posted is apt. Records are still be sold, but don't look for more people buying records.

Those who prefer print will still be around, but don't expect people to suddenly start buying a paper.

Anyone who thinks print is a viable strategy to increase revenue should revisit their beliefs. I look forward to newspaper websites promoting print or selling digital strategies such as viewing print ads on the web.

 

Anyone else picture Billy Morris in his office with this wave of dailies cutting to 3x a week and see him going, "hmmm.... this sounds like a good idea ...."

 

Inserts are a very good, fast way to deliver information, but you only need this information once a week or at most, twice.

I know everyone here is talking about PDFs and delivering them to a pad device, but do you really think opening up and visually scanning the Target, Wal mart, Home Depot, Lowes, Kroger, Sears, Best Buy and a few others is really faster than having the paper copies in front of you? The greatest delivery app in the world is still going to have to tapping away and reducing and enlarging like crazy.

If I can get through one in 10 minutes and the other in 20 or 25, I am going with 10 minutes every day of the week.

Print newspapers probably will die someday, but these inserts are going to outlive many newspapers and they will get delivered somehow.

 

New Jersey about to get its day in the barrel.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/179232/2-annarbor-com-execs-now-at-nj-com-fueling-curiosity-about-advances-intentions-in-garden-state/