Whap! Whap!

The St. Petersburg Times is redesigning its print product. Some of the changes , such as dropping stock listings, are inevitable. Some, such as merging metro and business are trendy, if misguided.

Some, to me, are just baffling. Why, for example, bring back color weather? The article says people asked for it. Readers want many things, but papers are trying to prioritize those wants. Why weather? Will anyone drop their subscription because the package shrinks or even disappears? I’m a weather fanatic, with a computerized weather station on one of my sheds, but I haven’t looked at a newspaper weather section in years. More than almost any other subject, weather is an arena in which papers can’t compete against TV, radio and the internet. Why to one of your weaknesses at the expense of things papers excel at (or could), such as local business coverage?

Why not drop weather and greatly expand business? It doesn’t even have to be expensive coverage. Lists of new businesses, property sales, promotions, etc., are valuable to people, can add dozens of local names to the paper and can be compiled by clerks. TV stations aren’t going to do that, but they’ll happily kick your butt with their weather coverage, so papers lose in both regards.

And if times are as bad as newspapers suggest, maybe it’s time for some radical ideas. Here’s the most radical I can think of: What about eliminating some print classified content? When you think about, papers are already “benefiting” if you can call it that, from reduced newsprint costs because classified sections are shrinking.

Why not try to turn that to your advantage? Why not convert large chunks of classifieds to free, online only ads? Why not fight back against CraigsList instead of meekly letting it claw you to death? You can still charge for upsells to print, perhaps at a hefty premium if you’re lucky. Maybe you can print all classifieds twice a week, for example, instead of every day, or print all car ads one day, all real estate another, all garage sales another, etc.

Rethinking classifieds might well seem like potential suicide for a newspaper.

But doing the same old same old is guaranteed suicide.

I’m going to take a breather from bashing newspapers to salute one: The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The paper’s launch of sdBackyard is intriguing. The allows customers to network, generate news and receive targeted news. The paper even plans to convert some of the content generated to print for its community papers.

My early review of the site is mixed, but at tleast the folks in San Diego are trying to use technology rather than fight it.

My primary concern is that the site isn’t very edgy. It looks and feels more like eons.com than it does Facebook, Craigslist, etc. That’s safer for the paper and makes it more likely that traditional newspaper readers will feel comfortable using the site. Therein lies the rub: It feels like an adjunct to the existing product more than an aggressive attempt to expand the company’s audience to non-traditional customers. I think other efforts, including Seattle’s NWSource do a better job of targeting a younger, more active audience, but without some of the tools sdBackyard employs.

Having said that, the best social-networking sites take on a life of their own and develop personalities shaped by users, so if editors and marketers can relinquish a good deal of control the site could be incredible.

Unfortunately, newspaper folks are not good at relinquishing control. There are complex concerns about credibility and civility that every social-networking site wrestles with (or should). Too often, however, newspaper execs’ concerns about the web take on an ethereal tone. Vague references to “quality” and “integrity” sound noble, but unless we let consumers take the lead in defining what those terms mean to them there’s more fear and arrogance than substance to the concerns.

Similarly, fear of losing control can keep smaller publishers from trying similar experiments. To keep complete control over a site like sdBackyard, from proprietary programming to maintenance to content, is expensive. Free, open-source platforms such as Drupal and Joomla are more than capable of doing the job for a small or mid-sized paper. For example, I have a little Drupal site for my family that allows users to create blogs, post photo galleries and videos, participate in forums and polls and more, and I’m no programming genius.

Using these tools does result in the loss of some control over the look and functionality of the site, because unless you are a programming genius you’re at the mercy of diffuse international band of developers for enhancements, upgrades, etc. Still, I gave up that control, and I invite smaller papers to do the same.

I think it’s a small price to pay for the survival of your company.

It’s a fact. A Pulitizer Prize winner says so. Not only that, but they’re too small and need to be owned by corporate behemoths to ever be good. I wish I were making this up, but it’s all here, in the Washington Post.

Business writer Steven Pearlstein and I agree on some points. Newspapers have to surrender huge profit margins to survive … OK, so we agree on one point.

From there, his recommendations are astonishingly contemptuous of customers. Some highlights:

“Today there are 1,437 daily newspapers in the United States, of which all but 400 have circulations of under 25,000. At that size, it is unlikely they can ever be very efficient or, for that matter, very good.”

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Sorry. I just can’t get that line from my previous post out of my head. I think it’s the perfect marketing slogan for a daily newspaper. It certainly represents the business philosophy of newspaper execs.

Imagine, for a moment, this scenario: Instead of racking up debt buying fading newspapers in the early 1990s, what if the big chains had gone into debt buying companies such as eBay, Yahoo and Google? Shoot, they might not have had to go into debt. Petty cash might have handled it back then.

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I wrote this for the employee newsletter at The Columbian six or seven years ago. At the time, few people found it appropriate or helpful. Not much has changed in the ensuing six or seven years:

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My wife, Kris, comes from a family that owns a cabin on the shores of Lake Chelan.

I thought about the cabin yesterday when I read the e-mail about stress and change, but not because it conjured an image of its serene beauty. I thought about it because earlier this summer a wildfire ravaged the area, causing the entire family to worry about the beloved house.

The fire came at a time when I was staying awake nights worrying about stagnant websites and how to re-invent New Media to cope with a 50 percent cut in resources. (more…)

Editors moan about the lack of resources. Publishers moan about the lack of profit and order editors to trim costs. Editors moan even louder about lack of resources and slash jobs. Readers and advertisers suffer, resulting in even lower profits ….

Meanwhile, there are simple, inexpensive ways to give readers and advertisers MORE of what they want. Some are free. Some could actually save money by eliminating the need for syndicated material to fill the space around ads. Let’s be honest. We spend a lot of time and money on those filler pages.

Here are a few ideas. Please add your own.

Use reverse shovelware

Instead of wrapping the ads with day-old news from the wires, wrap the ads with day-old blogs and comments from the paper’s website.

Some of the best writing from many staffs is in blogs, which most readers never see. In fact, even most web readers never see them because they’re buried on the website behind all the shovel ware from the newspaper, but that’s a rant for another entry.

Some papers print promos of what’s in the blog. Run the whole thing, with comments. It’s fresh local content no one else has, at no additional cost to the paper. No editor is shy about filling the website with shovelware. Why be shy about the reverse?

This employs the advantages of both media: The interactivity of the web, and the serendipitous nature of print. (more…)

In an incredibly bold leap into the late 20th Century, the Albany Times Union is giving up on letterpress. Letterpress.

Of course, to install a new press, the paper has to build a new building. So its customers get to pay tens of millions of dollars to get everything they ever dreamed of … except for things like more news, more interaction, competitive ad rates, lower circulation costs … little things like that. (more…)