With rare exception, newspapers throughout the United States are losing subscribers.
Pretend that you have been called in to advise newspaper management in a major city on how to turn their paper around. Some points that may come to mind:
- Upgrade the caliber of your editorial team. Don't employ anyone who is not extremely knowledgeable and who lacks common sense. Avoid the tokenism of hiring quotas on the basis of sex, race, or ethnicity and instead seek intellectual diversity.
- Keep the editorial slant out of the news stories. Don't think we haven't noticed how some stories are covered and which stories are never covered.
- Initially, try doing at least one thing well instead of many things poorly. People might subscribe if they know the local coverage is extraordinary; indeed, that may be the main reason why they will subscribe. In many newspapers, the international/national coverage is a joke and the local coverage, sports scores, movie times, and ads are the only reasons to subscribe.
- If you can't compete with cable news or the Internet when it comes to national and international coverage, go around them by hiring correspondents who can provide deeper coverage. Michael Totten is a blogger who has posted some fascinating pieces from the Middle East. Why haven't you hired him or his equivalent? Whatever happened to the concept of newspapers having war correspondents?
- Consider providing versions of your paper that go beyond the common practice of having different sections for different parts of the city. Instead, let subscribers choose if they prefer a politics-heavy version or a sports-heavy version or others emphasizing travel, finance, entertainment or local news. By having specialized sections, you can attract advertisers who want to target their ads. Your research may reveal that your readers [make that non-readers] would prefer a smaller paper of higher quality that is tailored to their interests instead of one filled with stories they don't want to read.
- Others?
