Once again here’s my surefire plan for saving daily papers: scare away the old folks once and for all. Those readers are killing you. Go tab, charge a lot more for home delivery, offer papers for free in boxes downtown, put “fuck” in a headline on the front page above the fold (if you haven’t gone tab), identify with the cities you’re freakin’ named for (and the not the freakin’ suburb your publisher lives in), and stop swimming with one anvil tucked under your left arm (“family newspaper”) and another tucked under your right (“objectivity”). Papers are for adults, not children, and mincing around about profanity turns off adult readers; people prefer openly biased media because letting your bias hang out there is, at least, honest; and, once again, catering to old timers and making sure there’s nothing in your paper that can’t be read to a six year-old at bedtime turns off adult readers.
And do all this now.
I’d add to that: think of your reporters as writers. And as such, allow your writers to express their personalities in their writing. Readers want to trust your reporters, but it’s much easier to develop that sort of personal relationship with a real person than it is with a faceless, disembodied byline.
and put a whole lotta t&a ads all through the back pages cause that stuff is recession-proof.
I think you are right on.
I would add one thing. In all durm und strang over death of newspapers, I never see a simple pie chart of where income comes fr4m and where costs go.
During the buy out of the LA paper, however, I read that actually the margin at papers IS reasonable. Like GM, their problmes are high legacy costs .. in this case mostly debt rather than pensions.
If this is correct then what the papers need is to go effin bankrupt (sorry Joel) and be replaced by new media that are not over leveraged.
Look at this way, writers work for cheap .. glory and byline counts more than food and housing. So lets be magnanimous and say one could put out the content of a newspaper with a total staff of ten writers, reporters and editors. All other employees presumably pay for themselves through sales and subscriptions.
So lets guess these ten folks cost 75k a year. Not much, but I am using the same pay model we see in academia, that is a total budget of 750k a year. 75k is well above what most folks teaching English get now. Of course, part of the model would be the potential of a writer becoming syndicated.
So, if my utterly ignorant calculation is correct, a non profit newspaper would likely need an income of $1.5 million/yr to function. Rule of thumb, here is that many business cost twice to run what goes to the producers of goods and services.
Again, I do not have the numbers, but how does this guestimate compare with the annual budget of the Times or PI? If I am way off, what does a writing staff cost?
The Stranger may have the answers. The Stranger in not not profit. How much extra work would it take to … using web based news conglomerates to get stuff from the AP, NYT, and el Jazeera, for the Stranger to go daily and how would that affect its over all profits?
Or, for that matter, what if the NYT changed its business model to produce a local edition? I think a Stranger Times would be 374% more interesting than the Seattle PIT paper(s).
Ah, Goldy, you don’t comprehend the function of bylines in the newspaper business. They’re chits given to reporters in lieu of money. You can always tell how much (little?) the reporters are paid by how many bylines a paper has — the more bylines, the less money.
Goldy:
Savage is a fucking imbecile, and you’re a bigger one for calling attention to him.
4 And you are oh, so much better in what way?
Presumably, Savage’s “go tab” means to go to a tabloid format–I guess that means a smaller-page format that you can open and read sort of like a book without having to do all that refolding business lest you drag the bottom of it in your ham and eggs, or belt your seatmate in the face trying to read it on the bus. Probably also make things a little…er, gaudier.
Should the American dailies perhaps go all the way in the direction of the papers in England, and put a photograph of a nekkid lady on Page 3?
The tabloid format is usually adopted in cities where there are a large number of commuters on public transit – like in New York and London. It’s easier for them to read the paper while commuting.
Otherwise, the larger newsprint format is cheaper to produce (larger, few pages are more cost-effective than fewer, smaller pages).
Other than that, I don’t see any benefit of one format over another.
Yeah, Goldy- call your reporters “writers” and to hell with them being “journalists”. Not that the Times and P-I haven’t already done so. I can’t tell fact from fiction in either of them because they have so skillfully “written” stories without regard to facts. We ought to call the papers by their real name: Propaganda.
Daily newspapers will become a thing of the past.
Better figure out a better way to line the bottom of your birdcage.
@10: The recent changes in the Times make it much worse. The paper is smaller, has less substance, less local coverage and I am thinking of cancelling my subscription just because it is now so pathetic.
The endorsement of Rossi, the fixation on the estate tax and musings of the senile Vesely (writer from Bellevue Square) make it even worse.
5. ArtFart spews:
4 And you are oh, so much better in what way?
Maybe poster 4 didn’t support attacking Iraq like Dan Savage did.
Or maybe he didn’t think that monorails would be a good transit system because he wouldn’t have to sit next to smelly folks.
Or maybe he realized that the monorail wouldn’t be able to be paid for via advertising.
@8 I’ve yet to meet a wingnut who can distinguish between fact, fiction, and propaganda — regardless of medium or format.
My guess has always been that “circulation revenue” (what people pay for the papers, by subscription or at the news stand) is supposed to pay for “production” (the cost of printing and distributing the papers). Ad revenue pays for everything else (salaries & overhead), and ad rates are directly linked to circulation. More readers, higher rates. The internet screws up this model, because circulation can remain high — but online advertising is more cost-effective. Thinner papers cost less to produce, but attract fewer readers: a death spiral.
I agree with the part about letting writers’ personalities show. Where are the great writers, the HL Menckens?
I recall years ago I used to read the Chicago Trib, and they had a columnist named Leanita McClain who was an amazing writer. In the short time she worked there she created a huge buzz, and I bet sold more papers than anything outside of the Cubs. Unfortunately she ended up committing suicide but was a bright light while she was around.
People are verbal creatures; no matter how dumb we appreciate talented writers. What Times or PI columnist ever has inspired readers to open the paper first to their column based on sheer writing?
@12…RR…
Oh? Like the way you substituted hysteric lynch-mob-like fiction for the truth when it came to the Haditha Marines who were subsequently vindicated?
As a self-confessed liberal hack, isn’t your bete noire the promulgation of the party line irrespective of its falsehood or how what you say defames others?
Just checking…
The Piper