OK, so now you're a three-day-a-week SE ...

I've been doodling around on a legal pad since last night trying to figure out how we'd handle a three-day press run. I still don't have a handle on it.

I suspect Wednesday will be features day - both local and wire. Fridays, you'll go heavy on previews for the weekend almost like a weekly entertainment section does. Sundays will be college football coverage, maybe some NFL stuff, takeouts and columns.

 

I work at an albeit much smaller paper that went from daily to twice weekly and we print the same number of pages/week now as we did as a 6-day daily. Obviously more feature coverage and more in-depth on most everything we cover.

 

Have you become used to it? Better? Worse? What are the pros and cons?

 

I would think the problem with this would be that I assume you're expected to have a full local web report seven days a week. The problem is how do you get all of the daily stuff done for the web while also investing the time necessary to do features and enterprise properly. Of course, that's always a challenge, but I think most of us probably would feel an extra sense of obligation to really make the features/enterprise good, given that the print product only comes out three times a week. At that point, you have one staff trying to do two vastly different types of products, which has the makings of being quite unworkable.

 

Yeah, we've become used to it. I wouldn't say it's better as an editorial product, because we're simply not as timely in print, but I think the Internet changed that game a long time ago. We made the change almost five years ago, and we have cut some staff but none in editorial. There is no shortage of work for the editorial staff either.

A major pro is the staff was spread thin with daily deadlines and that's no longer the case. It does allow us to do a little more investigative work, and we have more features than we did as a daily. But we are much better as a business. The biggest pro is we cut our printing expenses by about 60 percent, because our press can still handle us in one run so we only have to pay print staff for two shifts instead of six. We did lose almost 50 percent of our circulation revenue, but we only lost about 10 percent of advertising revenue. In all we went from about a -10 percent profit margin (in the red) to an avg. of 22 percent NOI the past four years. We've been able to give raises each year and even some bonuses (all staff, including editorial). Before that there were three consecutive years without a raise.

The community still clamors for the daily paper on occasion, but we've been honest about our plight before as a daily and for the most part everyone understands why we aren't anymore. I'd think bigger papers will have a much more difficult sell in this arena.

We also have a very aggressive paywall that we started two years ago, although the statistics don't show it having much of a positive or negative effect overall. We also don't put too much emphasis on the online coverage, except with breaking news. Instead of trying to compete with breaking news outlets so much (although we still break our share of stories, especially big stuff), we are comfortably fitting into a niche, which is my guess where the industry is headed anyway.

 

Geez, I really would hope upper management would have a plan BEFORE they decide to go thrice-weekly. The decision on general focus should be made far above the SE level. You can't have the various sections of the paper pulling in different directions.

Cop-out answer, sure. I think every alternative is going to be a bad one. Every paper I've worked on since 1982 has been seven days a week and it's hard for me to wrap my mind around anything else. My first full-time job in 1979 was at a paper that lacked a Sunday edition, and I thought that was really fucked. The paper I started working for as a high school kid in 1976 had no Saturday paper (and did not print on major holidays), and even at age 16 I thought that was really fucked. Let's just pretend one day a week does not exist!

Most of us who choose to spend significant time discussing the biz on a message board are obviously "students of the game" -- thinkers and not just drones. So it kills me to admit this, but this is the point at which I stop trying to figure it out and just do what I'm told. I have no answer for this.

 

Great insights. Thanks.

This is sort of how I've imagined it would be.

 

No offense, but if everyone in the industry thinks we're fucked, and the new generation already thinks we're obsolete, what's to keep us from really being fucked?

 

Oh, Frank, good one. You're killin' me.

 

I can see two workable approaches.

1) You approach it the way editors at weeklies or bi-weeklies have for years. Heavy emphasis on features, columns, enterprise. Game coverage if it happens to fall at the right time. (No one wants to read about Sunday's NFL game on Wednesday morning.)

2) You switch your approach entirely to a web-first approach. You still cover the same news you always have. It's just that now the web, rather than the printed page, is your platform. You still cover events, write previews, do features, run the agate, etc. You're still a 7-day-a-week operation and staff accordingly. Only difference now is you don't have the "we need more space on this day than we do on that day" or "oh my god, how are we going to fill this space since we have no news and all the reporters are off" dilemma. You simply publish as much or as little as there is on that given day.

Then you pick and choose what you decide to throw in the print edition, which becomes almost an afterthought.

 

Unless you are actually ADDING staff (gee, what a novel idea), I don't think you can have duel focuses. You're just adding more work to an already overworked staff. I think you have to proceed as always, just having a different platform. Then you take your "best of" for the printed page. If you don't have a Saturday print edition, then your high school gamers go online, not run in print on a second-day basis. Why run Friday games in a Sunday paper if you're not running Wednesday games in a Friday paper?

The real issue is how the heck is anyone making money on this? Sure, you cut production, newsprint and delivery costs. But I've yet to see anyone make much money on a web-only product. Lots of websites have come and gone. The ones that survive are usually adjunks to other entities.

 

In the 70s if it wasn't printed on paper, put on a truck and delivered to your house, it wasn't anywhere. Today they might not be printing everyday, but it is still a 7-day news operation. It's just a different delivery format.

I'm not saying the news doesn't suck, because obviously papers haven't mastered the business/advertising side of life on the net, but in a journalistic sense does it really matter if the story you write is actually on newsprint?