Newspapers in the twilight zone
To cut costs, The Seattle Times is laying off 200 people. Most of the carnage for the newsroom will be in the Eastside zoned editions, which will cease publication. Gotta save the core product, you know.
I have what I think is a much wiser strategy: Save the zones and gut the core product.
From the time I entered journalism in an era long ago, newspapers have looked for ways to zone the news. They just haven’t looked very hard. Oh, they’ve spent money on the effort. Lots of it, mostly on technology - presses, inserters, microwaves, fiber-optics - all designed in part to make zoning easier. The Times even built a huge new plant on the booming Eastside, giving it the ability to print more generic papers faster and deliver them more conveniently to the fewer and fewer people who want them. I guess it all seemed like a good idea at the time.
But the resulting zoned editions at most papers have consisted of little more than cosmetic changes to the local front and/or an inside page or two. The rest of the paper is the same old stuff the people in the zone see on TV or really don’t care much about. The zones are large, so they still have lots of news far removed from the reader’s neighborhood, and they’re still too expensive for little advertisers. So, execs concluded, zoning doesn’t work. Blow up the zones and either lay off the people or move them back to the core, where they’re needed.
Why not, instead, put all that whizbang technology to work, blow up the core product and distribute people out the zones where they’re needed?
Page 1 (yes, THAT Page 1) becomes the zoned section front, sharing some items, mostly promos, with other zones. Sell small ads on the front page to local advertisers; even if they’re still expensive, the advertiser is getting front page exposure.
I can hear journalists are demanding answers now. “News from Podunk isn’t worth Page 1 of The Metro Behemoth-Globe!” It is to people in Podunk. “Can you imagine the workload of zoning Page 1?” No more work than zoning inside metro pages. “We don‘t have enough news from every zone to fill Page 1!” That‘s a problem; it’s a big reason people don‘t buy your paper. “Ads on Page 1 !?!?!?” Do you want to keep your job?
For 24 years, I lived near downtown Portland. Now I live on rural edge of the metro area. Stories from out here that would have seemed like a total waste when I lived in the city would now be major enticements for me to pick up the paper if I saw them on Page 1. Pull every story about my area and put it on Page 1. If one is running elsewhere in the paper, you don’t have to redo that page. So it runs twice. I probably wouldn’t see it on the inside page anyway, or at least might not realize how local it is. Would I miss the stories that now run on Page 1? Certainly not the wire stories, and you still would be promoting them on Page 1 if I wanted to read them.
Bottom line, for you exec types, is this: Why not use all that expensive technology you bought? At this point, honestly, what do you have to lose?
