State of the business is dismal, as we know, and yet ...

Lack of paywalls didn't kill newspapers as much as changing habits did.

 

I've been told people like me are great to work with. Willing to work 65 hours and get paid for 40; very efficient and cooperative; never take vacations; never ask for time off. Perfect employee I've been told.

 

Shit on the industry by saying: there's "no reason to subscribe ... none at all;" "there's absolutely no reason to subscribe;" "of course they don't read print ..."

or my favorite

Why the hell would anybody subscribe to newspapers that once were great and now are gutted??

Yeah, you must be the life of the office!

 

Yes, I bet management loves you.

what is it you actually make Fredrick?

 

I remember a similar discussion in the late 1990s in Podunk, Mich. ... but not about a website. Our esteemed owner/publisher threw his full weight behind INFOSOURCE, a phone voice mail bank with news updates, high school scores, a list of obits, summaries of feature stories, etc. In an era where most reporters didn't have cell phones, we were hassled by management to call the special INFOSOURCE staff number, punch in our secret code, and leave a voice message with the game's final score before leaving the school on Friday night.

That wasn't the savior of newspapers, either.

 

I live in Richmond, where the Times-Dispatch used to be Virginia's state paper and now produces very little Sports news (even its preps coverage is mediocre) that I haven't already read somewhere else.

The T-D even attempts to cover the Redskins -- a necessity, I suppose, since the team moved its training camp to Richmond -- but it's well down the list of outlets I'd go to if I was desperate for Skins news.

Its staff has been gutted, and as a result, the print product relies way too heavily on the "old school" coverage pattern of advances/features/gamers/second-day follows. Not nearly enough analysis and too much coverage "from a distance," undoubtedly the product of a staff that has been stretched past its breaking point.

If there are people desperate to read that paper, I'd love to meet them. All 3 of them.

 

But wouldn't a paywall have prevented the habit of expecting the best coverage for free?

Where is he wrong?

Good metro dailies used to put out a product of roughly 100 pages Monday-Friday and 300 pages on Sunday (400 leading up to Christmas). Now the Monday-Friday is about 30-40 pages and it's even less than that, really, because it's also a smaller page. The Sunday paper that used to be 300 pages is now maybe 180. And they charge through the nose for this far-inferior product. No company in the history of companies has cut its way to major success. Newspapers have done nothing but cut -- and cut deeply -- for the last 15 years.

Newspapers offer way less than they ever did. And because the printed-paper product is so small now, what reporters actually write ends up being less on the Web product, too.

 

How many of the 100 pages in Monday-Friday newspapers were ads and how many pages of ads are there today? A serious question. When I was in high school in the 70's a speaker I heard from the Denver Post said that in order to get publishers mailing rates from the post office a paper could not have more than 75% ads. I saw a lot of papers push that. But today the papers I see are lucky to have 25% ads.

Content has been cut but the classifieds have gone away along with a lot of retail and that has cut size.

 

I don't know how many times it needs to be said, but . . .

"Success" as an option is off the table. "Major success" has been for a while. "Keeping the sinking ship afloat a little longer" is the goal.

McClatchy just got its expected warning from the NYSE that it's in danger of being delisted if it can't get the stock price back above $1. The company's answer? Stock buybacks to artificially pump up the price. Does this sound like a company that really envisions "major success."

When you're on a sinking ship your first thought is not, "Gee, I hope we're near some fancy resort island." It's "Get me a bleeping piece of land anywhere."

 

Old Tony nails it here.

I live in a town with a metro population of about 1 million, and the local paper, the state's largest by far, has stopped selling papers in newsracks, so it clearly realizes it is no longer in the newsPAPER business, but is in the newsDELIVERY biz. Sadly, it doesn't do a very good job of that, either, because ultimately, my local paper is actually in the political and development promoting biz.

 

When this was done in Albuquerque one of the rationales was the newsstand price is now so high people don't have enough quarters. Which I am sure is true.

But one thing really caught my attention in Albuquerque was that the circulation guy was patting himself on the back for his innovative marketing technique to retailers. The company now sells papers to the retailers at a discounted rate but does not require returns. Which is a good way to pad circulation. I wonder what the Journal's penetration really is?

 

I can buy an 85-cent pack of Oreos out of a vending machine at work with a credit card. Yet newspapers never strayed from that generations-old coin slot rack.

Come to think of it, I can't even remember the last time I even saw one of those. It's not like they are on street corners or outside of grocery stores in my town.