OK, so now you're a three-day-a-week SE ...

Do this if you have real, confirmed names, not "handles."

 

Maybe he doesn't.

 

Put up a firewall.

Yeah, that's it.

A firewall.

 

We have a separate publisher and distributor for the magazine. They handle all the ad sales and distribution, we produce the content. Basically, it's a marketing tool for our online product.

 

Is it inconsistent (i.e., confusing to the readers) if you forsake the traditional baseball coverage (boxes and roundups) but retain the normal college football coverage in the Sunday edition of your thrice-weekly product.

I don't think so, especially in rabid college football readership areas, but I'm just throwing it out there.

 

Lots of pretty pictures.

Seriously...lots of pictures of the locals, with captions beneath...can't print that shit out from the Internet and show off to family and friends.

 

The thing you can't do, it seems to me, is act like a daily that just comes out three times a week - the big news of Tuesday in Wednesday paper, etc. Context will be king.

 

Sad day indeed. The first thing I would do is make Wednesday a must read for prep stats.
Leaders, averages, team stats, a full agate page of prep stats.
Say what you want about the internet-to-newspaper battles, the newspaper will always win in prep sports because the people mentioned enjoy seeing their name in the paper rather than on the Interweb.
So it goes.
And if I was commissioned with a three-day a week print product, by goodness every by-line in that thing would be local. Unless Dale Jr. wona Saturday night race in Kansas, every story would be local.
Maybe that's part of the thought process — this decision to go three days a week could allow you to cut the high cost of wire services. Just a thought.
Good luck to those in the Newhouse chain.

 

How big are the sections on those days? And how big is my staff?

 

You would assume those sections would be no smaller than the ones you have now, at least in terms of page count. Staffing is the part that would trouble me the most if I was working at one of those,

 

Thinking about this from the business perspective, there seems to be a few factors at play here. First, you'd assume the three days the paper will publish are going to be on the days that have the track record with the most advertising dollars. As Mizzou and others have suggested, the majority of advertisers are best off only running ads on a few days. To me, that says the loss in advertising revenue for the print product isn't a straight ratio. You're not losing 4/7 of advertising revenue. You could even argue that cutting four days increases the demand for print revenue, making the remaining available space for ads more valuable.

I don't have any hard numbers to back this assumption up, but if the above is at least somewhat correct (I haven't personally worked for a newspaper), is the ad revenue loss that great? In any case, you probably lose at least some ad revenue.

The biggest question to me seems to be what happens to circulation size. Some have mentioned lowering cost to appeal to more potential buyers, which seems like it could work in theory. If I'm a reader that doesn't have time to read every day, I'd be more inclined to buy a three-times-a-week paper, particularly if there's a slight cost drop-off. Empirically, my parents canceled their T-P scrip and dropped to a Sunday-only scrip a few years ago. I'd bet they'd pay an intermediate cost for a three-times-a-week scrip.

The other factor I see is the bump in online views. It may not be a whole lot, but the readers who are dedicated seven-days-a-week readers will probably visit your online content more. Without a pay wall, in my opinion, the gains here are minimal. However, there is at least somewhat of a demand for the day-to-day content you're producing on the website. Setting up a pay wall concurrently to dropping four days on the paper publication would seem to regain at least some of the revenue loss from the four days you're losing print advertising for.

Then, you also save the cost of production for those four days.

All in all, it seems to me that the trade-off would be fairly even, no?

Relative Givens
1) Give up some advertising revenue from print product.
2) Save some money on print production.

Unknowns
1) What happens to circulation.
2) How much (if any) bump extra online views give to bottom line.

Seems to me like you'd have to weigh the relative knowns as a cost-benefit analysis, then try to extrapolate the unknowns as best you can. The biggest problem I see is the lack of an online pay wall from the get-go. Prevailing wisdom is that ad revenue based on page visitors isn't enough to offset the cost of the lost print ad revenue. You've either got to find local support with online ads (clickthrough rates really kill you here of late) or put up a pay wall to generate enough online revenue to make up for the loss of print revenue.

Anyway, sorry for rambling. Had a few beers and thoughts started swirling.

 

Get rid of the Scoreboard page, run round-ups of beat coverage stuff that used to appear every, then beef up the feature, enterprise, columns, etc. Problem is that type of reporting takes the longest amount of time and investment, something a paper that just cut from 7 days to 3 days isn't interesting wasting. All this does is delay the inevitable, really.