The New Orleans Times-Picayune May Reduce Frequency of Publication -- NY Times

75%? Sure! You are out of your fucking mind.

I've bought and sold advertising. Nobody believes four people are reading every newspaper. Nobody.

That's a number made up by the newspaper industry, in an effort to boost ad sales. It's like when teams would come to me siting a Joyce Julius evaluation of an outfield sign, and tell me it was worth $3M, or some crazy number, based on television impressions. Sure it is.

Apply a little logic. You think the average paper gets read by four people? That means some must be getting read by five, six, or seven, to make up for the papers only being read by one person. You really believe that?

Lots of papers are only read by one person. If old people are the most reliable customers, you're mostly talking about a max household of two.

And, how many don't get read at all because the "household" is too busy running around to little Timmy's extracurricular activities, or because it was delivered after the "household" left for work in the morning, or because the "household" is out of town, and forgot to cancel the paper?

How many are delivered to corporate offices, and never read? When I worked at Continental Airlines, we got a whole bunch of Houston Chronicles delivered every day. (And, the New York Times, and Wall St. Journal too.) At a minimum, every VP got one. How many of those do you think got read at the office?

And, why limit your total audience to the population of just New Orleans? Isn't the T-P a metro paper? is it not distributed in Kenner, and other surrounding towns?

Finally, if they had a 75% penetration, they'd be making money! Instead of cutting their printing schedule and laying people off, they'd be raising their price and advertising rates. Advertisers would be falling all over themselves to work with a media property that reached 75% of their audience.

But, it doesn't. It reaches about 12%. And, we don't know many of those people even read the paper, and we can't accurately measure the effectiveness of the advertising.

 

Two words: Warren Buffett.

(Wouldn't that be something? Talk about a white knight. And maybe he could figure out how to turn a profiit.)

 

I think a better way to determine penetration is by households. Because even you admit that in a household where two adults live it is likely that they both read the paper at least occasionally. The average household has about 2.8 people so New Orleans would have about 430,000 households. So I think it is fair to say that the Times Picayune was reaching over 30% of households on weekdays and 35% on weekends. And since the household was paying for it I think that it was being read at least occasionally.

 

New publisher puts his mug and column at top of today's front page. Everything else came from fired staff.

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/blogofneworleans/archives/2012/06/17/times-picayune-mathews-speaks-new-jobs-posted-and-a-jazz-funeral-for-the-print-edition

 

OK, so what is considered good market penetration?

Used to be, 1/3 of a population base was considered good. If there were 100,000 people in the county and your paid circ. was around 33,000 that was pretty good. Is it substantially less than that now?

 

Decent read. Seems the guy is trying to be honest. It's easy to sit here in front of our computers and blast companies for trying something different. Change is painful to all of us. And this new approach may or may not work.

As Matthews points out in his piece, the writing has been on the wall for some time now. It's not like someone woke up one morning and, out of shear boredom, decided to reinvent the wheel. Some sort of change was necessary or the entire operation was going to go under pretty quickly. Will it work? Only time will tell. There are challenges, for sure. But I can't fault them for trying.

 

It's not just the change, it's the moves that accompany it.
On the one hand, they're vowing to provide more and better coverage of the city this way and build a business model that will make the operation viable for years to come.
On the other hand, they're cutting 2/3 of a strong newsroom, posting job announcements that would make Arianna Huffington cringe and, to the outside world at least, venturing into a realm where the economics are murky at best, suicidal at worst.
It isn't the (perhaps inevitable) change people are upset about. It's the way they're going about it. It's using Agent Orange on your yard to kill some unsightly weeds because, dammit, 20 bottles of Roundup just ain't cutting it.

 

Of course, this plan is all Ricky Mathews -- he designed and implemented it in Michigan and now here. He sold it, he's defending it.

 

The. Paper. Is. Making. Money. Now.

 

Winner.

You can't expand coverage and do more with only a third or less of your staff, and many of the smart connected ones at that. It's just impossible and anyone who says they can, or are, is lying, stupid or both.

 

I'm surprised Newhouse isn't trying to go open source like JRC did?

BTW, is JRC using open source operating systems and software?

 

Of course it is. And so are the papers in 'Bama. The moves have been made to keep the revenues high.