What should we do? Very serious question..

[DyePack]

The best thing that could happen is for the terrible chains to die -- and to die quickly -- so some people with a clue have a shot at the revenue and righting the ship.

This industry had one last shot to redeem itself in 1999 and 2000. It chose to binge on "young effin' studs" and then to purge people 18 months later.

It deserves to die and to die painfully. One of the posters here criticizes Bush for not having intellectual curiosity.

There is very little intellectual curiosity in today's newsrooms.

 

[BTExpress]

I interviewed at a major midwest paper earlier this year. The topic of cutbacks/streamlining came up and the SE said their paper didn't have any agate clerks on staff. Instead, they farm the agate to a third party company in Canada who puts those pages together and sends it to the printing plant. The plus is that the paper doesn't have to pay six clerks twenty-some odd thousand dollars a year. The negative is that the paper doesn't know if they have undiscovered young talent.

Agate. Outsourced.

Now I've seen everything.

 

[buckweaver]

i dreamed of being a newspaper columnist. i love newspapers.

but newspapers are not adapting well to the new age....it won't be long until rivals.com hires a columnist who will be more influential than newspaper columnists.... newspapers refused to cover recruiting thoroughly, so a web site popped up and is doing the issue justice....

when will some newspaper sports section have the balls to ignore the apse formula and dramatically change its approach?

Rivals deals in rumors. It has its niche and it is the best at what it does.

If newspapers can't find the money to cover NHL road games or the NBA finals, then there's no way they have the resources to cover high school football recruiting.

Newspapers also have journalistic ethics standards to uphold -- printing a rumor a day that Mr. 17-year-old defensive lineman has narrowed down his top 3 to State U, State Tech and Out-of-State U isn't newsworthy. And a great, great majority of people, locally and nationally, don't care except when it concerns their kid or kids they know.

 

[buckweaver]

The best thing that could happen is for the terrible chains to die -- and to die quickly -- so some people with a clue have a shot at the revenue and righting the ship.

This industry had one last shot to redeem itself in 1999 and 2000. It chose to binge on "young effin' studs" and then to purge people 18 months later.

It deserves to die and to die painfully. One of the posters here criticizes Bush for not having intellectual curiosity.

There is very little intellectual curiosity in today's newsrooms.

That be me. And there's little intellectual curiosity in this entire country right now. A great many selfish people care about big issues only when/where it concerns/affects their individual lives.

 

[DyePack]

The best thing that could happen is for the terrible chains to die -- and to die quickly -- so some people with a clue have a shot at the revenue and righting the ship.

This industry had one last shot to redeem itself in 1999 and 2000. It chose to binge on "young effin' studs" and then to purge people 18 months later.

It deserves to die and to die painfully. One of the posters here criticizes Bush for not having intellectual curiosity.

There is very little intellectual curiosity in today's newsrooms.

That be me. And there's little intellectual curiosity in this entire country right now. A great many selfish people care about big issues only when/where it concerns/affects their individual lives.

Thought so. And I agree with that last part, too.

 

[Buck]

As mentioned above, the real question is: How do we make the electronic medium profitable?
Online ad revenue is low, and the average online reader will not pay for content.
That's the real quandry.

 

[novelist_wannabe]

When the profitability margin is there, then the print product will die a pretty quick death. I know newsroom management types at some major papers already have adopted this mentality: Before, there were certain things we didn't cover because we didn't have the space. Now, we have unlimited space.

And the profitability threshold might not be as high as some people think. If you're not paying for newsprint or circulation staff -- or if you get it to where you're only paying a small fraction for those things compared to what you are currently -- then clearly you don't have to sell nearly as many ads.

I'm curious who the ABC is attempting to tackle circulation figures in the computer age. Is it as simple as counting web-page hits?

 

[Buck]

I'm curious who the ABC is attempting to tackle circulation figures in the computer age. Is it as simple as counting web-page hits?

We get Web traffic numbers presented in a variety of ways: page views, unique visitors, sustained views, etc.

 

[buckweaver]

If newspapers can't find the money to cover NHL road games or the NBA finals, then there's no way they have the resources to cover high school football recruiting.

Newspapers also have journalistic ethics standards to uphold -- printing a rumor a day that Mr. 17-year-old defensive lineman has narrowed down his top 3 to State U, State Tech and Out-of-State U isn't newsworthy. And a great, great majority of people, locally and nationally, don't care except when it concerns their kid or kids they know.

I feel recruiting should only be covered on signing day. We like to think readers don't care, but there are a lot of people who eat this stuff up. Which is mopre a social commentary than anything else.

Plenty of papers still cover the stuff, wasting . . err. . . USING a lot of space. The point about "resources" is offbase, because covering prep recruiting takes a few phone calls and some legwork on the part of a reporter or two. No flights, no money required except in the phone bill.

Not to threadjack this too much (it's not worth it), but the legwork depends on your paper and your area. At my previous stop, we were a 20K with appx. 20 high schools in our coverage area. And we always had a couple dozen athletes to look out for on Signing Day every year. That's a lot of phone calls, and a lot of work, for a reporter or two when you only got four people on staff.

We blew the hell out of recruiting the day before and day-of, but we didn't run a whole lot the rest of the time. (We did, however, have prep notebooks throughout the seasons where we added a note/brief that City High's such-and-such verbally committed to State U, etc. That seemed to satisfy interest enough to tide them over 'til Signing Day.)

 

[markvid]

when will some newspaper sports section have the balls to ignore the apse formula and dramatically change its approach?

I swear I'm not trying to be a smartass when I say this, but I thought that's what the National was supposed to be.

 

[JayFarrar]

People do pay for online content.
The Wall Street Journal, to name one, has been very successful at it.
If all the papers went to the pay model, and the key would be all, then it would work.
You couldn't have some major players not participate though. It would have to be everyone.
It's sort of like TV. If you want the real basics, you can get them for free. If you want specialized content you have to get cable or a dish and pay for it. If you premium content, you have to pay extra, like HBO.
You also have to get places like Yahoo, Google, etc., paying for the content they put back up on the web. If they want to pay for AP, that's fine. But they need to laying out some cash for everyone else. Then, they would in a way become the internet's cable companies.
That's really going to be the next big step.
When you read the blogs, the things they always ***** about is the NYTimes pay wall,  for the premium select content. Without the major players involved, the blogs are pointless. And, they know this.

 

[hockeybeat]

Shouldn't college beat writers and preps writers handle recruiting stories?

 

[Angola!]

As mentioned above, the real question is: How do we make the electronic medium profitable?
Online ad revenue is low, and the average online reader will not pay for content.
That's the real quandry.

I think part of it is making the online content worth paying for. ESPN.com seems to be doing pretty well with its Insider stuff. If you want to read rumors or Simmons' archives or whatever else, you have to pay. The problem with most newspapers online sites is that it is just the basic stuff you can get in the print edition. Maybe newspapers need to start having writers write exclusively for the web, or have beat writers doing blogs that cost money to read.
I don't know what the answers are by any means, but I think papers must make the content worth paying a monthly fee for.

 

[Herbert Anchovy]

Rivals.com is not real journalism.

 

[farmerjerome]

We're going to be ****ed sooner or later.

But they still need writers for the on-line sites.

 

[DyePack]

We're going to be ****ed sooner or later.

But they still need writers for the on-line sites.

I heard that argument 10 years ago, and it's being exposed as lame.

If the chains can manage to snag most outlets, they can have people at other papers write for those sites. It's already happening in print anyway.

The end result? Even fewer jobs.

 

[Herbert Anchovy]

Rivals.com is not real journalism.

Agreed.

And buckweaver: I scrolled right past Whitlock's point on that, so sorry. I think aside from signing day, recruiting should be left to the Web people, but that's just me. 

I don't know if it's like this in other places (it probably is), but my paper has been ahead of Rivals in almost everything correspondent to what Rivals does. In fact, they've called us for information after our stories have run. So it's not like these guys are all ahead of us on the curve. A lot of their **** they are getting initially from newspapers, and they just have the time and wherewithal to expand on that.

 

[PopeDirkBenedict]

I think one of the keys for newspapers is finding your hook and charging extra for that.I see newspapers not going the route of needing a subscription to access any news story on the website, but rather something similiar to ESPN.com or NYTimes.com. You want the latest stuff from the AP wire, your most basic of news/gamers and any local news that breaks before the next day's paper comes out, it will be free. But you create content above-and-beyond the basics and charge for that. In sports, I think you create specialized content for your big-time teams and charge for that. There is no reason that Boston papers should not have special pay Red Sox content and I can rattle off a ton of examples off the top of my head of other papers who either are already doing this or should follow suit (Milwaukee and the Packers, Indianapolis and the Indiana basketball, Birmingham and Alabama football, Dallas and Cowboys/UT football, St. Louis and the Cardinals, Kansas City and the Chiefs, etc.) Why is Rivals so successful? Because they give the hardcore fan the deluge of information that they want. We aren't filling that deluge and taking advantage of that fan's desire to read anything and everything he/she can about their team. WSJ is the Rivals.com of the business world. You don't read the WSJ for the lifestyles section. Their readers want national news, incredibly in-depth business reporting and incredibly conservative editorials and are willing to pay for the level of detail WSJ brings to the table.

You make the pay content free to anyone with a hard-copy subscription or a reasonable price otherwise. Any news story of high interest, you saturate your paid-content website with (special election coverage, extra in-depth coverage of the big murder trial, BLOGS!, etc.) and promote the hell out of your paid-content section in the hard copy edition. The papers that get left in the dust are ones like my old paper, where the only reason it succeeds is because it's there. The only reason to read that paper is that it is pretty much the only paper of record within a 50-mile radius and you can't go anywhere else. There is no one overwhelming team/story, sports or news, that you can point to and say, "If we saturate the hell out of that, readers will come running." Like every other newspaper, they will eventually have to create paid website content, there just won't be anything there that people really want to pay for.

 

[dixiehack]

Knoxville's Vols coverage comes the closest to what you are describing.

 

[lantaur]

One reason the Packers and Cowboys pay sites on newspapers do well/exist is there is a big following of these teams outside the immediate reading area. Minnesota tried a Vikings pay site - not so much luck. Atlanta tried with their columnists, then I guess realized no one is from Atlanta and cares about the hometown teams. ;) :) (It's also a reason the Wall Street Journal can charge - they don't have a home base, per se ... and offer very specific content)

Of course, I guess if a paper/site put A LOT into a pay site, then it might be worth people's whiles.

My two cents at least, if it's worth even that.