Digital First pursuing Gannett

Preparest thy bootyhole!

 

One in my area has a Division I college, a Double-A baseball team, a D-II college, 2 PGA Tour events and about 130 high schools in the coverage area. They have 1 sports full timer and nothing else. Not even a sports clerk.

 

This is a Gannett paper?

 

If you have a D1 university in your town or area and a lot of your readers are either alums or staffers of said school - you should cover them well. At least as well as the closest pro teams that people root for.

 

I suppose, but . . .

Most magazine stories demand that readers turn the page (or several of them).
All books demand that readers turn hundreds of them.

Newspaper jumps are not exactly a uniquely frustrating experience.

 

Especially now when readers aren't going to have to hunt through a 32-page A section for the jump page. Most of the interior crud I see in newspaper sections, long wire pieces devoide of meaning to the local area. I do wonder if design hubs has heightened the bias against jumps - particularly if you have multiple designers for a section and/or the earlier deadline (usually) for interior pages.

 

The Gannett paper I was at, briefly, adhered to the rule that one of its A1 stories wouldn’t jump. A new, fully Gannetized editor came in and things flipped. A few 15 inch stories out front, and one jumped. In fairness, this was 1999-2000. Obviously, things changed.

It did get me thinking about how to better serve readers. While they may not know that they hate jumps, it is asking the reader to take a step. So when I called the shots further along in my career, I designed the paper so that stories would jump from the front to the back when possible, and we’d never jump less than 4 inches or so. Not that we’d hack stories to fit a no-jump rule, but I thought it was silly to ask readers to flip pages just for a couple paragraphs. Jumping to the same spread also made the plateroom happy and bought me some time on deadline.

 

I'd figure advertisers would want to be on a page where all the stories jump to.

 

A combined DFM/Gannett makes sense in NJ. DFM's Trentonian (less than 10K circ) could be closed and its building sold off. The other 6 NJ papers would lose their individual titles and be converted to a "NJ Today" statewide paper. The smaller papers now are down to one sportwriter and DFM/Gannett would have a combined sports staff that would better cover the NYC/Philly sports teams. I'd rather see a DFM/Gannett byline than AP copy covering last night's ballgame.

 

Yes.

 

I think if that idea made sense, the Star Ledger would have made a combined statewide paper by now. The difference between North Jersey and South Jersey seems like the difference between New York City and the Delmarva Peninsula.

I might be wrong but I think the Bergen Record shares more non-state government news with the Journal News in New York than it does the Asbury Park Press.

 

You’re right about The Record. The Star Ledgers sister paper, The Trenton Times, has been gutted to the extreme. If it has more than 5 editorial staff, I’d be shocked. The TT used to have enough sportswriters to send staff to Philly and NYC baseball games. But those days are long long gone.