DMN buyouts

I don't see it all that often, but when I do, it seems to me it's lacking in section depth (not intellectual; in fullness of coverage). News hole is not what it should be for a newspaper that size. I don't know about Yankees of sports sections.

And it may be the only yardstick available for use, but winning APSE is not the be-all, end-all for sports sections. They're not always right.

 

Do you still need to pay or subscribe to read the DMN?

I think that's a reason I'm not reading it on a regular basis. Or at all.
Did like their NBA blog during the finals, though.

 

The DMN is no longer the Yankees of sports sections because their Steinbrenner (Dave Smith) has left the building.

 

With all due respect to the DMN, the New York Yankees of sports pages is the New York Times -- highly-regarded, national profile, ambitious, unbelievable resources, a highly-recognizable big boss , located in the heart of the nation's media spotlight, and always at or near the top of their league but not always the undisputed best. The Red Sox 9not the cursed version) would be the Washington Post.

 

What he posted.

 

Unless the paper has cut back its newshole in the past few years, it used to have one of the biggest sections in the country.
And my comparison to the Yankees is the several years of APSE honors, like the Yankees teams of many years ago. Both have a lot of money to spend, some of it wasted.

 

Alas, the DMN is more like the Yankees of the late '80s/early '90s -- living off the name, but not delivering the same goods.

As another poster noted, their Steinbrenner left the building. So they're operating more on a Cleveland Indians budget.

 

It should be noted that the DMN cut back its circulation efforts a few months back.
For those not familiar, the DMN used to circulate in five states: Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Trucked out daily for the boxes and 7-day home delivery. No longer. The DMN can now be purchased in Austin and the extended Dallas metro area. So not even state-wide circulation.
The circulation cut wasn't huge, as I recall it was around 50,000, but that is still bigger than most papers.
My guess is that and the current round of cuts are related. I can just see the reasoning: Well we lost all this circulation, so we need to lose some jobs as well.

 

I cannot relate to a 50,000 circulation decrease not being huge ... not even for a major metro. That is huge.

 

I didn't notice it until one of their writers mentioned it to me, but newshole has shrunk at the DMN, and dramatically. And to answer the earlier question about Cowlishaw, yes.

 

The DMN used to be an example of a newspaper doing things right: Staffing up, paying well, covering events both sports and otherwise near and far, and violently opposed to giving a crap how other papers did things. Oh yeah, it managed to be profitable too.

This, to me, smacks of Belo basically giving up. I know they're positioning it as a "shift toward multimedia," and that's nice spin. But to me, it sounds like the beginning of the end. It's not ever going to be the paper that sent 20-some people to the Super Bowl. And maybe it shouldn't be. But as both a journalist and a reader, it sure was great when it was.

 

Buyouts like these are all about a corporation repositioning itself, a far more frightening prospect than mere layoffs.
Layoffs suggest, "Times are tough right now, but will get better."
Repositioning, as Bruce Springsteen sang, means "Foreman says these jobs, are going boys, and they ain't coming back."
There is another push to fully engage multi-media - not just the web, but pod-casting, cell-phone news, etc. All this new technology has re-engaged media strategists. The overhead is much lower because, essentially, the reader provides the printing press (computer, cell, Ipod).
Why spend millions pumping out editions when you can fling it through the air.
There is initial capital investment required, however, to make all that work. That capital is accrued via cutting bodies (and all the fixed costs - salary, benefits, pensions, etc.) that are huge costs for companies.
You dump those, set up your vehicles, then hire cheap content providers.
Do you know that most media surveys suggest that readers decreasingly use newspapers as their source for sports. They go on-line, not only to ESPN and the like, but the MLB.com and team sites, where they can hear good news and get the stats.