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How to save your newspaper

SFG75

Well-Known Member
This is an excellent article that is very worthy of discussion. The author maintains that newspapers are falling aprt as the three-headed monster of their income is slowly dying. Newsstands and subscriptions are being replaced by free online content. Instead of buying the New York Times to read Paul Krugman, you could just read his article hyperlinked on the huffingtonpost or on the NYT site iteself. This leaves the last leg-avertising, for newspapers to stand on. This isn't enough to employ a legion of editors, reporters, and investigative personnel needed to run a great paper.

So what are the solutions?

The author maintains some sort of pay portal thing where you could buy an article for a small amount of mone, or the daily content for dollar or two a day. The problem with that is this, people are already getting tha content for FREE and will they only go to the sites that are free and that make money through advertising? How do you compensate a Krugman, a great editor, or other journalists if the content is free?

The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.

This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.
 
I heard it once suggested that newspapers could charge readers to participate in online discussions on it's website. However, even if that worked, why would the newspaper use that revenue to keep it's print edition going? They wouldn't.

Just an aside - the discussion on newspaper websites often borders on asinine. God some of those people are stupid.

My idea for a print newspaper is to publish it in tabloid format making it physically easier to read. Use color photos, four color print and a unique font, similar to the USA Today. The most important aspect would be your reporters. They have to break unique stories that nobody else has gotten to yet. You would only need to break a couple of big stories each year to develop a good reputation. Of course, you could still publish AP stories as well. It should also have full and complete stock tables in the business section with four color print. Stock tables were the first thing to go from print newspapers once the internet started gaining traction. The editors mistakenly believe that readers only use stock tables to look up the price of a particular stock they own, and they likened that to printing a daily dictionary just in case someone may want to look up a word. That was an incorrect assumption. Many people read the stock tables to get a detailed view of what the marke actually did rather than just look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average. So my color coding in the stock tables would be green +'s and red -'s, bold lettering for stocks that made a huge price move and underscoring for stocks that had an unusual increase in volume. The entertainment section of the newspaper would have to contain gossip and trash on a level with TMX, the politeness of ET is too tame. I think print newspapers could survive IF THEY WERE WILLING TO EVOLVE AND IMPROVE. They are not.
 
I couldn't decide if I should start a new thread or not. So sheepishly, I'm going to post my confession in this thread.

The majority of my posts since I've joined B&R have been about newspapers. And most of those posts have been moaning and groaning about their slow demise. Tommorrow, I will become part of the problem.

Tommorrow I am cancelling my newspaper subscription. I can't believe it's come to this.

My job is being affected by the economy, I'm practically down to part time hours now. In addtion, I have some huge unexpected expenses coming up very soon. Since I don't have a taxpayer base to rob from, I must make spending cuts. The $11 a month I spend on my Wall Street Journal Subscription will be cut from the budget.

90% of my decision is based on my financial condition, 10% on the changing face of the paper. It doesn't contain very much stock market data anymore, in fact the USA Today has more data than the WSJ.

I'm going to miss my newspaper and coffee every morning. Ten years from now I'll be reminiscing about how I had to give up my newspaper during the great depression of '09.

I really hate to do this, but I gotta.
 
Well over here the small local newspapers are increasing their subscriber nr's. And there are some newspapers that target a specific audience that are rapidly increasing their subscriber numbers. The big losers are the dumbed down tabloids filled with sports and gossip (and to combat this they just dumb down their newspaper even further).
 
Hugh, aesthetics aside, how does the online WSJ compare to the dead tree format as far as content goes?
 
Hugh, aesthetics aside, how does the online WSJ compare to the dead tree format as far as content goes?

I believe the content is exactly the same. The WSJ, unlike other papers, charges a subscription fee for it's online content. They have over 900,000 online subscribers the last time I heard.
 
I believe the content is exactly the same. The WSJ, unlike other papers, charges a subscription fee for it's online content. They have over 900,000 online subscribers the last time I heard.

If that's the case then I would call that a successful model.

The subscription rate of $1.99 a week doesn't really save you a whole lot of money though.
 
Well, you could always read the WSJ at the library, so I guess you could still do that and they still get their money through your city government.
 
It's make-or-break time for many newspapers. Denver and Seattle recently lost dailies, the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times are both in bankruptcy, and owners of the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle threaten closure. One reader mourned the loss of her local newspaper in Connecticut by lamenting that she had gone from living in a city to living off just another exit on Interstate 95. As comedian Stephen Colbert put it last week, "The impending death of the newspaper industry: Where will they print the obituary?"


Barney Kilgore.
Creative destruction is blowing hard through the news industry, as digital technology gives readers access to endless sources of news but undermines the ability of publishers to support news departments. City newspapers are no longer the dominant way people get news or the main way advertisers reach consumers. The recession is accelerating these trends, with advertising so soft even Web-only news operations, which don't have the legacy costs of print, are now struggling to support journalism.

As the remaining city newspapers rethink themselves, editors and publishers might consult a road map for how newspapers can live alongside new media that was drawn up more than 50 years ago by Bernard Kilgore, outlined in a new biography by former Journal executive Richard Tofel, "Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism."

Kilgore had remarkable judgment early about the journalistic issue of our day: how readers use old media, new media and both. When Kilgore became managing editor of the Journal in 1941, he inherited a business model that technology had undermined. Founded in 1889 to provide market news and stock prices to individual investors, the Journal lost half its circulation as this basic information became widely available.

Kilgore observed that then new media such as radio meant market news was available in real time. Some cities had a dozen newspapers that had gained the Journal's once-valuable ability to report share prices.

The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, "It doesn't have to have happened yesterday to be news," and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page "What's News -- " column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant.

On the morning after Pearl Harbor, other newspapers recounted the facts already known to all the day before through radio. The Journal's page-one story instead began, "War with Japan means industrial revolution in the United States." It outlined the implications for the economy, industry and commodity and financial markets.

Kilgore led the Journal's circulation to one million by the 1960s from 33,000 in the 1940s by adapting the newspaper to a role reflecting how people used different media for news. His rallying cry was, "The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading."

Business and financial news is different from the general news focus of city newspapers, but in 1958 the owners of the New York Herald Tribune approached Kilgore for help. Mr. Tofel uncovered a five-page memo Kilgore wrote them on how to keep city newspapers essential to readers. The Herald Tribune, he wrote, is "too much a newspaper that might be published in Philadelphia, Washington or Chicago just as readily as in metropolitan New York." Kilgore urged the "compact model newspaper." Readers valued their time, so the newspaper should have just one section, with larger editions on Sunday when people had more time to read.

His advice was clearly ahead of its time. The owners didn't heed it, and the Herald Tribune went out of business in 1967. But his observations on what readers want from city newspapers may be even more true in today's online world. Readers increasingly know yesterday what happened yesterday through Web sites, television and news alerts.

"Kilgore's first critical finding," Mr. Tofel wrote, was "that readers seek insight into tomorrow even more than an account of yesterday." This "may only now be getting through to many editors and publishers." Indeed, at a time when print readership is declining, The Economist, with its weekly focus on interpretation, is gaining circulation. The Journal continues to focus on what readers need, growing the number of individuals paying for the newspaper and the Web site.

If readers would prefer more-compact city newspapers, a less-is-more approach could help cut newsprint, printing, distribution and other costs that don't add to the journalism. Newspaper editors could craft a new, forward-looking role for print, alongside the what's-happening-right-now focus of digital news.

There's a lot of experimentation by editors around the country to find out what people want from their print and online news. For city newspapers on the brink, the Barney Kilgore approach might deliver some badly needed good news.

Write informationage@wsj.com

This is an op-ed piece by L. Gordon Crovitz in today's Wall Street Journal.

Notice that the memo written years ago by Kilgore is similar to the idea I mentioned earlier in this thread about newspapers going to a tabloid format. Kilgore was obviously a genius, why didn't the Herald take his advice then? And will any newspapers take the advice now? Most likely not, as I also mentioned earlier in this thread, they are not willing to evolve.
 
The WSJ continues to arrive even though my subscription ended last week. It didn't arrive on Saturday, perhaps the delivery person who works that day was paying attention.

Frankly, I'm having trouble adjusting to my new digital only format. I don't feel as informed as I should, and I don't concentrate as well while reading my computer monitor. I'd better start getting used to it though.
 
The WSJ continues to arrive even though my subscription ended last week. It didn't arrive on Saturday, perhaps the delivery person who works that day was paying attention.

Frankly, I'm having trouble adjusting to my new digital only format. I don't feel as informed as I should, and I don't concentrate as well while reading my computer monitor. I'd better start getting used to it though.

There is something to that. Last month I helped judge a regional science fair and one of the entries was reading comprehension on traditional printed media vs computer screens. Each group was given the same short story to read and were then given a test based on the story. The group that read the paper version scored 81% and the group that read off of the screen scored a 49%.
 
There is something to that. Last month I helped judge a regional science fair and one of the entries was reading comprehension on traditional printed media vs computer screens. Each group was given the same short story to read and were then given a test based on the story. The group that read the paper version scored 81% and the group that read off of the screen scored a 49%.

Now that is interesting to ponder. Your comments echo the research that has been conducted recently on that subject. Here is a great link on the subject of screen reading vs. book reading.

People of the Screen.
 
I've moved to a new apartment and I subscribed to the WSJ again. You would think that since I know how the paper has changed and cancelled my subscription before, that I will not be complaining about it now that I've re-subscribed. But you would be wrong. I am still going to complain.
 
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