You are the media company CEO ...

I'd annex the Sudenland.

 

This assumes that I don't have some corporate-head or investors telling me what to do. If that's the case, I retire. They'll just lead to me to ruin.

If it's my paper, here's what I do: First, I cut costs.

I cut costs by cutting to core competencies. My company's primary purposes are to sell advertising, gather the news and distribute a product. There are other companies whose core competnecies are finance, accounting, payroll, IT and printing. I outsource all of those functions:

* ADP or Paychex handles the payroll.
* Some accounting firm keeps the books.
* A courier company handles the distribution.
* A hosting firm takes care of IT. All of my business systems are externally hosted. I can shut down a huge room full of energy- (and money-)sucking servers, and keep a person or two around to handle desktop support and the necessary communication with the hosting firm.

Then, there's that big press and the building housing it. There's probably some enterprising soul in town who has always wanted to run a commercial printing business. I sell the press and all of its real estate to this enterprising soul and become his/her best customer.

Now, I've just laid off probably 20-30 people and generated a bit of cash from the sale of the press and real estate that can go toward servicing debt. Next stop: Advertising department.

My ad sales force has the best commission program in the business. Which is a good thing, because that's all they get. Hungry sales people are good sales people. Bonuses are in store for those who can lock in long-term contracts and recurring revenue.

They'll be selling space in a print product that is Berliner-sized and is a newspaper unlike any you've ever read. It's not the "paper of record." It has well-thought-out news analysis, opinion and local flavor. It doesn't have much in the way of briefs or agate. No classified. It's probably no longer a general-interest newspaper. You'll find it much more interesting if you're from our city than you will if you're not. If you're not from our city, though, you're going to learn more about our city by reading our paper than you ever would if you don't.

My writers, editors, photographers and designers will be absolutely working their asses off to fill the thing every day, because popping out a few 9-inch gamers or meeting roundups or police blotters isn't going to cut it.

The upside: We're not trying to get it to readers at 6 a.m. We're hoping people will spend some time with the paper when they get home at night.

Oh, and the single-copy price is $3. It's worth every penny. All that crap you hear about "stuff you can't get anywhere else?" Yeah, it's stuff you can't get anywhere else. That becomes, essentially, our mission statement. I take some of the savings from eliminating IT and Finance and put that toward a no-holds-barred marketing campaign. It's a premium buy for advertisers, because you know that anybody who plunked down 3 bones for our rag will probably spend some time with it.

There'll be a small, probably overworked staff of reporters and editors feeding the blotter stuff and 9-inch quickie stories to the web site. Those stories will refer to the expanded coverage and different takes in the paper, not the other way around. The web site will be bare-bones, just the basics, whatever we can afford after we've poured everything else we have into the print product. Those who kick ass at this, who find a way to make a 9-inch meeting story better than the average 9-inch meeting story, will get a crack at writing for the print product. This staff will also find time to be monitoring the blogs and such. Screw bloggers appropriating our content; we'll appropriate theirs. If some local gadfly has some info that we can turn into a story, we'll do so. Yeah, Twitterers, we're following you.

Working for me wouldn't be easy, but it'd be a helluva lot of fun. We might fail. But we'd go down swinging, and we'd go down doing what we do best.

 

I'd make my web site indispensable as local source of sports---push the heck out of reporting and breaking stories, charge for it.

Then do a once- or twice-weekly paper in which the content is nothing like the online product, but covers the same beats. Keep it thin but prime beef.

With both products you have something readers over the age of 12 can't do without.

Then a third division of special pubishing products---premiums and incentives---you do with local corporations and organizations through partnerships. Nothing gets printed until it is sold and paid for.

 

So.. your model is an evening paper that costs $90 a month?

 

A lot of people who work in sports believe its sports that sells a newspaper. How about a daily paper that puts more emphasis on sports than news. At smaller papers, have a larger sports staff than news staff. Have the news reporters come back and lay out pages after covering an assignment. Most of their assignments aren't on tight deadline, anyway. Give sports a chance to do more features and in-depth stuff. Have a sports staff big enough to let a guy take a day off every now and then so he can come back refreshed and ready to take on the next challenge. Let the sports department be the one with its own copy editors. Lets say you are in a town with a small-time college football team. Maybe the team only draws 5,000. That's like, what, 4,950 less than those who show up at a council meeting? I know it may put things in an improper context in the grand scheme of things, but what's going on now isn't working.

 

I didn't read FileNotFound until after I had posted my barebones version, but FNF has a lot of good points. $3 daily is a lot, though, even for a terrific read you can't get anywhere else; I go the other direction and charge a quarter apiece, or make it once a week and then charge a buck or two.

 

I worked at a paper similar in concept to what you are talking about---it was called The National. Nice product, but beaucoup bucks wasted.

 

...and one more thing. Make management bring the sports staff pizza each Friday and Saturday night when they get the section out on deadline. News does it once every four fucking years and they piss all over themselves when the miss deadline by only an hour and get rewarded with pizza.

 

Seriously, I'm barely willing to play $3 for a long-form magazine ... but, there are some decent ideas -- or kernels -- in there.

 

OK, maybe $1.50. $1 for SportsJournalists.com members.

But if we're a better, more valuable read than the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal (and again, if we're giving you local news you can't get anywhere else, so why shouldn't we be), shouldn't it be worth a bit more than the NYT or WSJ?

 

I'm not talking about a paper like The National. I'm talking about a local paper with more of an emphasis on sports and news, just to see what happens. I'm also talking about fiscal responsibility as well; not some dream scenario in which the paper sends a dozen guys to cover the Super Bowl that features on teams with local interest.

 

I mentioned The National not in the sense to make what you are talking about a national product, not at all, but just from the conceptual standpoint of heavy emphasis on sports becasue that is what most people REALLY buy the paper for. Sorry for the confusion. I concur with what you originally posted. Good points.