No gamer on front page?

Wraparounds like this are enjoyable. It shows the paper is at least paying attention to sports and giving it a little extra push. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach market gets plenty of love from its papers, as the Herald, SS and Palm Beach Post all feature some pretty darn good sports coverage. Down there, college football and pro football sections are every-week occurrences instead of just on special occasions.

 

Frank, you and I would at least agree on this: Identity problems are precisely what's causing newspapers to fail. From what we cover to how we cover it to how we allocate resouces to get the job done, we don't know what we are or what we want to be. So, we wind up trying to be many things. And we do those many things in a half-ass way. The key for any given newspaper is for it to determine what it can do better than anybody else in the market. Once that's determined, go nuts with it. This is where my type of change comes in. It's change within a framework of what you can do better than anyone else. Without knowing and doing what you're best at -- and most newspapers are struggling with this nowadays -- you wind up changing for change's sake and pissing off readers.

 

I have to disagree.

This thread started with a newspaper putting the gamer inside.

Twenty years ago, that newspaper had one Monday sports section, with the local NFL team getting two-thirds of the front page and two pages inside.

Today, that newspaper has two Monday sports sections (NFL and regular sports), with the local NFL team getting the entire front page and four pages inside. And there's also plenty of extra feaures on the paper's web site. The only point of controversy is that the gamer is (gasp!) inside.

If the NFL coverage in this paper is an example of giving the reader "less news all the time". . . then I'm from another planet.

 

I think the suits know this, that's why they're delving into niche products. Newspapers are not the only mass medium dealing with a proliferation of competition. TV networks have seen their share of the market dwindle because of cable, mass-market radio now is trying to deal with satellite, even older Internet sites have growing competition within that realm. The problem all established media have in common is how to sustain a mass medium in an increasingly fractionalized market.

Well, opinion is available all over for free. But no one has the resources to match us on news coverage.

 

Newspapers have reallocated resources to some areas, taken from others. I don't think you can say that overall we are giving readers as much as we once did. Every place we've expanded, we've cut somewhere else. Maybe not in sports, but somewhere in the paper. My paper is still a good one and circulation has been relatively stable -- but we've lost about 50 bodies and space is down quite a bit overall over the past decade. We've expanded in some areas, but we can't say overall that readers are getting more. They aren't.

 

answer: cut your columnists and hire GA reporters. the readers will love that.

 

We aren't giving them as much as we were in the high-flying 90s.

But we are giving them more than they were getting at any time before the mid-80s.

In 1982 on the night the Lakers won the NBA title, the LA Times gave it three-fourths of the front sports page and three inside pages --- none of them open.

I don't have any sections with me from their recent title runs . . . but I can't imagine that they gave the readers less than that.

Folks, the 90s were a mirage. Everything fell into place perfectly for a few years. Trying to use that time as the "way it should be" will only cause disappointment.

You think newspaper space has taken a hit since 1999? Try looking at my stock portfolio.

 

Again, you are comparing sports sections to sports sections. You need to compare full newspapers to full newspapers. We have given sports a bigger slice of the pie in some cases, but almost everywhere you look, the pie has shrunk. We have cut the crap out of local news -- stopped covering all those "boring" meetings -- while enhancing NFL coverage and a few other things. Has this helped us as a business? The circulation figures say no.

 

yes. news should run a six-inch brief on an upcoming meeting stating what's going to happen at said meeting by rewriting the agenda, then send someone to the meeting to report that what you really wrote was going to happen in that meeting in yesterday's paper indeed did take place.

what a wonderful use of staff hours and damned enticing for the reader.

 

Tom, I've concluded you're totally clueless.

 

and i've concluded you're an old man who hates anything new or different in this business.

shocking, you old geezers usually wrap your arms around change.