In your city/state, does sports drive readership?

I think it's fairly obvious that the sports section is not the reason why newspapers were created and are not the be all/end all for most newspapers. But to say sports aren't an extremely important part of the overall paper for - I'll throw a number out - 20 percent of the readership, to me, is foolishness. That's quite a chunk of people even though that 20 percent probably varies greatly from place to place.

When we talk about his, I think sports guys/gals get their feelings hurt that sports aren't important. But there's a difference between being the No. 1 influence (local news) and still being a pretty large influence (sports). There's nothing wrong with not being No. 1. It's just too bad so many cuts have to come at the expense of sports because its not No. 1.

 

A Car with a dead battery, no less.

 

Funny, either my ME is a clone of your ME or vice versa. We were told that via a "readership survey" conducted about a year ago that these drive circulation:

1. Obituaries
2. Comics
3. Coupons
4-9. Other stuff
10. Sports

Since then, we have went from one page of comics to two pages, there are feature stories written about dead people who did nothing worthwile with their lives and we've been cut from eight Sunday sports pages down to three or four.

 

Okay. So how's your circulation?

 

About three-four years ago, 25K. Now, about 23K. It was lower a year ago, but the upper management came up with a sweat deal to fatten the number.

The corporate chain bought up the smaller daily about 40 miles away. Smaller daily dropped a Sunday edition, so if you get the smaller daily Monday-Saturday, you get the bigger daily's Sunday. Fattened the Sunday figures by about 1,000.

Also, they started charging all employees $4 per month for the paper so we can be counted in paid circulation. That added about another 150.

I'm looking for work before the fiscal year begins in October because there could be layoffs. They've frozen every position vacated in the last year and cut out at least three free publications. There's nothing left to cut but current employees. (Part of the problem is that they're comparing newsroom expenses to last summer, when there were only two news reporters instead of the usual seven slots. It's just not realistic.)

Rant over.