Lupica is laid off

The web traffic is extremely healthy with a national audience and the paper recently passed 1 million Facebook likes. They know what they're doing online -- but making serious money online is not an obstacle that has afflicted the NYDN alone.

 

Copy editor Stan Chrapowicki posted he did his final back page on Wednesday. Was there almost 19 years

 

Sorry Frank. May your layoff be brief.

 

Wishing you the best, Frank. Always enjoy reading your take of things on here.

 

Frank, retire. I did. I like it.

 

Anybody want to say Fredrick was wrong about this topic now?? About news organizations rejoicing to get rid of the high priced people? What a great profession, college students. You work to get to the top, you excel at your profession and you are wanted OUT. Everything that is wrong with our country? Journalism. This should not be a profession that requires an education anymore. Just bring in anybody who can put together a boring sentence. The true pros ARE NOT WANTED.

 

And besides my obvious comments about the state of this wretched industry, I would like to say I know several of the journalists laid off and I want to say THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE. You are all class acts and true professionals. This business is the laughingstock of the business world, how the suits made it unprofitable and irrelevant. May you all figure a way to make money off your talent, which is extraordinary. The suits win again, but your talent will not be dismissed so easily!!! (Yes I'm upset).

 

i've yet to see evidence to the contrary: the creative side of journalism has been let down by fat-and-happy business siders for the last 30 years. and the astoundingly talented writers, photogs, editors and page designers are the ones who continue to bear the brunt of that staggering incompetence -- while also being made to feel as if it's somehow their fault. we can start with the decision -- blithely made despite a 10,000-year record of human behavior -- to give away the product on-line for free, but the list is endless...and enraging.

 

The content was always essentially free. The 25 or 50 cents that we grew up paying for the newspaper never covered the cost of the content. It covered some distribution costs, and ensured people didn't take it for free to line their bird cage. And, it allowed the business side to sell ads based on paying customers.

Because of the advertising revenue, there was never a correlation between the quality and value of the writing and the price of the newspaper.

With the loss of advertising revenue, there is no good business model for 90% of the remaining newspapers.

The loss of advertising dollars was not due to staggering incompetence and it wasn't possible to raise subscription/newsstand prices enough to make up for the loss.

 

putting content on-line for free -- as opposed to, say, charging $10 a month from the start -- was incompetence on an epic scale. now people are in the habit of wanting free content, and they're not going to pony up.

 

At $2.50 per week, you're still basically giving the content away. Sure, you're production costs go down some, but you're not covering the costs of the content unless you're also bringing in advertising dollars.

But, at the time that papers moved to the web, there's no evidence people would have paid even $10 per month, and there was no way to monetize the web content through advertising -- at least not like you could when print was dominant, and the web didn't exist.

There's also the issue that most newspaper websites sucked at the time, and weren't worth $10 per month.

Lastly, the folks most willing to pay -- old folks -- were the least likely to consume the news online, and the folks most likely to consume news online -- younger folks -- were the most adamant about not paying for it.

As much as folks want to blame management for fucking up, they didn't have a lot of good options.

The best thing they could have done was to sell their newspapers and put the money into other business.