Return of the PM as an E-edition?

[MileHigh]

I see your point about e-editions. But the quality of local journalism is depressing. I have traveled a lot this summer and bought a lot of local papers. You look at some and jsut say wtf is going on.

The worse paper was the Fresno Bee. I bought the Monday paper. The paper had five bylined stories. Two were in sports. The lead sports story was about a local high school baseball team winning their region the Friday before. There was also a story on the high school track and field regionals from the Saturday before. Then there were two features and a brief report on a dead body of a missing man being discovered. Four of the five stories were written by the same guy. The other bylined feature appears to have been left over from the previous week. The sports page still had the Saturday MLB standings with no updates from Sunday day games.

I bought the paper an hour south of Fresno in Visilia so maybe their was I bought some regional edition but still, why would anyone pay money for this? Why would anyone subscribe to this? And Fresno is a county with a population of one million people.

Freson was the worst paper I bought but I saw some other truly bad papers. Lubbock, for example, lead sports the day I was there with a story of the minor league hockey team in Amarillo, which is two hours away, hiring a general manager. I don't think anyone in Lubbock cared.

Guessing that's a deadline issue. And again, it makes so much more sense to go away from print. It's expensive. In this day and age, it loses its timeliness by the time it's sent, printed and delivered. An e-edition, you can deliver it at 5 a.m. to inboxes and it would be completed an hour or three beforehand. Plus, you can fix major errors if need be with the e-edition. It just makes so much more sense in this day and age.

I get it: I grew up with print. I worked in print. Times change.

 

[ChrisLong]

In other words … a Suit.

Funny you would phrase it that way. On the day he was announced as the editor in chief of the OCR, he showed up wearing khaki's, tennis shoes, an unbuttoned shirt over a T-shirt and his ever-president neckware with Tinkerbell dangling from it (he loved Disneyland).

 

[I Should Coco]

Funny you would phrase it that way. On the day he was announced as the editor in chief of the OCR, he showed up wearing khaki's, tennis shoes, an unbuttoned shirt over a T-shirt and his ever-president neckware with Tinkerbell dangling from it (he loved Disneyland).

He still does. A huge feature story that started on A1 and took up tons of inside real estate with graphics, maps, etc. was Curley's guide to navigating Disneyland. Because that's really local to Spokane and the Inland Northwest ...
Hey, I've never worked for the guy, and he's certainly throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks at the Spokesman-Review. Maybe he's helping keep them afloat financially. But there's a whole lotta ego going on, from what I can see and have heard.

 

[ChrisLong]

He still does. A huge future story that started on A1 and took up tons of inside real estate with graphics, maps, etc. was Curley's guide to navigating Disneyland. Because that's really local to Spokane and the Inland Northwest ...
Hey, I've never worked for the guy, and he's certainly throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks at the Spokesman-Review. Maybe he's helping keep them afloat financially. But there's a whole lotta ego going on, from what I can see and have heard.

I worked for Curley. He lied to my face. Under his direction, my 44-year career ended. I was OK with that, but I figured I had 3 years left. I exited at age 62. I was planning on getting to 65. Truthfully, I'm glad it ended. I have nothing to prove. I like being retired.

 

[Batman]

If I had someone else's money to lose, I'd turn a morning paper into an evening paper. Heck, places with afternoon deadlines might as well. Think there's something to unwinding the day with curated quality daily pieces.

The problem there isn't so much content as it is distribution. It's getting harder and harder to find carriers to get the paper from the press to the customers. You also have a big issue with even small papers going to production hubs and centralized press locations, which is why you have the early deadlines.

Our paper, for example, has a circulation of about 7,000. We used to be an afternoon paper with our own press, but when our lead pressman was ready to retire and our carrier force dwindled to just a handful of people, they shuttered the press and went to mail delivery. We now are one of three similar-sized regional papers from the same chain printed on the same press, about an hour from our office, and have a 5:30 p.m. deadline instead of 10:30 a.m. like in the old days simply because that's our time slot to print. We have one or two carriers who drive 70 minutes each way to get the papers, and they take them to either racks, stores or the post office for mail delivery.
All of those were cost-cutting moves, of course, but looking just a bit down the road they were also prudent. Despite our best efforts we didn't have a ready replacement for the guy who had run the press for 30 years, and if we kept a carrier on board for more than a month it was considered a win.

All of that is to say, you can write Pulitzer-quality material every day but if there's no way to get it to readers it's worthless. And one of the major overlooked breakdowns during the industry's long slide is that it's getting harder and harder to keep those key production and distribution components in place. Running a press is a dying profession, and the days of cheap teenage paperboys pedaling all over town for the sake of having their first job are long gone.

 

[MileHigh]

I understand the deadline issues. Fresno was consolidated into the Sacramento plant so the paper had to come about 170 miles. And now Sacramento is being printed in the Bay area so God knows where Fresno prints.

But leading a Monday paper with a game story from Friday night? Only five bylined stories, four by the same guy. That is just a complete indifference to the quality of the product by the hedge fund that controls the paper. Digital works better logistically but if it is produced with the same utter lack of concern for the editorial product the e-edition will continue not to attract subscribers. And this paper will go away in both print and electronic forms because they are charging a lot of money for what is basically a non-existent product. It will catch up to them.

Agreed. Which is why if/when you go digital only, your approach is the halcyon days of the 1990s when you can send a final page at like 1 a.m. for the next morning's edition instead of 1 p.m. that happens today.

 

[LanceyHoward]

All of those were cost-cutting moves, of course, but looking just a bit down the road they were also prudent. Despite our best efforts we didn't have a ready replacement for the guy who had run the press for 30 years, and if we kept a carrier on board for more than a month it was considered a win.

All of that is to say, you can write Pulitzer-quality material every day but if there's no way to get it to readers it's worthless. And one of the major overlooked breakdowns during the industry's long slide is that it's getting harder and harder to keep those key production and distribution components in place. Running a press is a dying profession, and the days of cheap teenage paperboys pedaling all over town for the sake of having their first job are long gone.

We have discussed this before but the death of print will be when papers can not find anyone to deliver the product. The remaining carriers are still getting up at three in the morning but making less money as circulation continues to decline while the price of gas does not. And now many of those carriers are passing fast food restaurants advertising for help at $14 an hour. These restaurants allow one to be inside during the winter and offer days off and vacations.

 

[MeanGreenATO]

@Batman, that's a great point. The consolidation of printing presses has significantly hurt the product.

Then again, we're talking about execs who are just trying to ride profits for as long as possible and not really concerned about the future of the print product. I really wish a bored VC would give the evening edition a run, just to see how it plays out. I mean, that has to be less risky than backing a start-up, right?

 

[2muchcoffeeman]

Agreed. Which is why if/when you go digital only, your approach is the halcyon days of the 1990s when you can send a final page at like 1 a.m. for the next morning's edition instead of 1 p.m. that happens today.

Disagree. If you're doing a PM e-edition, then you absolutely want whatever news broke in the morning. Without having to worry about the timing of the press run, you could even make the final out-the-door-on-the-web deadline as late as 2 p.m.

 

[LanceyHoward]

Disagree. If you're doing a PM e-edition, then you absolutely want whatever news broke in the morning. Without having to worry about the timing of the press run, you could even make the final out-the-door-on-the-web deadline as late as 2 p.m.

The trend towards consolidation of plants will continue. But I have wondered when afternoon papers will reappear because pf the backlogs at the main plant. For example I think Cincinnati and Indianapolis print in Columbus. Instead of Indianapolis printing at 9:00 P.M. or whenever just flip the paper back to afternoon. The presses can run at six of so in the morning. That way you can at least get all the sports scores in and have decent game stories.

And from a production point of view you can run a lot mroe presses through the same plant that should pay for the second shift.

 

[MileHigh]

Disagree. If you're doing a PM e-edition, then you absolutely want whatever news broke in the morning. Without having to worry about the timing of the press run, you could even make the final out-the-door-on-the-web deadline as late as 2 p.m.

Of course. Just like if you're doing an e-edition only for the a.m., you can have an out-the-door edition at 2 a.m.

 

[wicked]

Why read an e-edition with a limited amount of stories when you have websites with many, many more stories — websites that update without having to "reproduce" a page? I don't see the sell.