No gamer on front page?

That's absurd. Doing something just to do something can hurt the product and drive away customers. If you don't think you can screw up the product and lose tens of thousands of customers within one audit period, you're lucky. I have seen it, however.

The other thing is that we're not exactly seeing innovation. We're seeing the retrying of failed concepts from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s that some people are too young or ignorant to know about. I can tell you that in 1975-76 when I was taking a high school journalism class, we already were studying about what was then called a "maga-paper" -- the marrying of magazine concepts and display with daily newspaper deadlines, a less newsy, more analytical product. It didn't work then, it won't work now, and I'm not going to say it's going to work just because some jerkoffs want to get their creative rocks off without first making the effort to learn anything about U.S. journalism history. Show me you have any clue whatsoever about where we've already been and what's been tried and abandoned, and I'll be all ears.

 

Clearly we are not talking about colossal failures or mistakes because in those such cases no movement is better than movement for the sake of movement. In time all things equalize so movement is necessary to create division only to create equalization.

 

Did I somehow wander into a parallel universe in which this place has been taken over by people spouting business-school bullshit? In English, please.

 

When it comes to ideas and innovation -- real innovation, not rehashing -- a response like "that's absurd" underlies why we have such a poor relationship with readers. We think we know best. We think readers are stupid. We forget that outside our newsrooms, we're real people just like them. But when we get to work, we go into some kind of journo-hyperdrive where we forget about all the time demands on the lives of ordinary people. It's naive to think that we operate in a vacuum, outside today's media saturation and 24/7 lifestyle. We just need to cut readers a break and stop enforcing arcane rules of what a newspaper is (or should be).

 

All right, I'll change "absurd" to "monumentally naive." I'll tell you something about readers: They don't like us tugging their wangs. They don't want us constantly shifting gears, they like continuity. They don't like pre-paying for Newspaper A, only to have it morph into Newspaper B three months later and then into Newspaper C a year after that. All changes have repercussions. That doesn't mean we never make changes, it means we don't make them cavalierly. And the attitude you proposed, that any change is good -- well, that's pretty cavalier. Because you CAN turn off a lot of people in one fell swoop. If you think differently, then obviously you've never worked at places that struggled with constant identity changes. I have, and the results were not good. It's not like you can try Pipe Dream #1, then go to Pipe Dream #2, etc., and readers will behave passively. At some point they get turned off. We've been trying to reinvent the wheel for a long, long time -- I'd say you could start by reading "The Paper," a history of the New York Herald Tribune and its innovations of the early 1960s because the people rethinking that paper were smarter than most of us, and still they failed. In the end, lots of news is what works. It's pretty simple, really.

 

so how's it workin' for us now frank?

more and more people who live in the country and less and less subscribers. let's continue to do the same old shit. i'm sure that'll work just fine.

 

What people like you propose IS the same old shit. We've continually recycled the same old panaceas in every decade, and I don't see anything new being proposed here. You think minimizing gamers is new? There was a big to-do in the early 1990s when the Toronto Star tried using 8-inch gamers as a sidebar to the "main," which was a feature. It obviously did not work. Poster pages go back as far as the NY Herald Tribune in the 1960s. That obviously did not work.

I am not proposing the same old shit. I am proposing we try being newspapers again.

Why don't you offer some substance instead of writing like some whiny kid?

 

fuck, i've worked with people like you frank. the only way to do it is the way you did it back in the day. the 70s weren't that good, frank.

 

I think Frank is saying that our problem is that we're not relying on what you call ``the same old shit.'' In fact, we've been tinkering endlessly with the product in the name of innovation -- focusing on the packaging rather than the content, cutting staff and space and giving the reader less news all the time -- when the right formula has been right in front of us from the beginning. Give the readers more news, more information. The rest is, to a large extent superfluous.

(BTW, Frank, my apologies for speaking for you. If I misread your meaning, please let me know.)

 

If you had worked with people like me, you'd have learned something by now and clearly you haven't.

The 1970s were good for us, not so good for readers. They were fun for journalists because we were reinventing journalism. They were not so good for readers because we stopped covering their fucking towns. I was working on newspapers during the 1970s, but I didn't turn 20 until the 1970s had only a few months to go. I didn't care about much more than my clips pile and neither did most of the people I worked with. While we were innovating and giving our egos a stroke-job, the newspaper lost nearly a third of its circulation. I think we are seeing the exact same thing now with similar results.

 

frank - people want to read something interesting, period.

by the way - how did that whole usa today thing work out?

 

USA Today would be a fine model if our goal is to own 1 percent of the market, largely at hotels and airports, but most newspapers can't survive that way.

If you have an answer, why don't you spell it out instead of making brief, snotty comments? I think you're all BS.