Kill staff illustrations? Eliminate features sections? Egads, it’s getting worse…
What the hell is going on here? Seems like papers are falling over themselves — faster than ever before — in a frenzy to gut their products.
It’s a rush to cut costs. Yeah, you save costs, which improves the bottom line. But diminishing the product causes you to disappoint and, ultimately, to run off readers. Which eventually hurts your bottom line even more.
Jay Small — anyone remember him? — writes on how to make more time for innovation in the newsroom:
Here’s one that always ticks off my old SND friends, but I wholeheartedly believe it:
Stop art directing features fronts and packages as if they’re concert posters. Almost all newspapers I see nowadays long ago reached “design affluence,” where their inherent formats are more than good enough to present a good story with a good headline and related visuals). So why invest the cycles fidgeting with custom letterforms and Photoshop filters?
And no newspaper should still spend permanent full-time staff time doing features illustrations — get a stable of free-lance illustrators and commission them as needed.
I like seeing designers focus on the best ways to present information for “absorption” — don’t just attract interest, hold it, and help people remember the messages we offer every day. Infographics that use visuals to describe a series of events should also make it easier to prepare a related story — because you don’t have to repeat that same series of events in prose.
Many of you remember Jay as longtime art director of The Indianapolis Star. He’s been general manager of the Interactive Newspapers Group at E.W. Scripps Co. for about three years.
This quote was Jay explaining how to free up news resources. The question he was answering was posed a couple weeks ago by Ryan Sholin in his Carnival of Journalism:
What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?
Some of the more interesting answers, according to Sholin:
David Cohn, my Knight News Challenge brother-in-arms, says news organizations should save money by dropping AP wire content. I’m with him on this, more or less: No one is subscribing to your newspaper to find out what’s going on outside of a 50-mile radius of your town, unless you’re the New York Times, Washington Post, or USA Today, with few exceptions.
Matt King, a reporter and beatblogger at what I’d call a small-to-medium sized newspaper in New York, says the low hanging fruit of the police beat is actually a bit of an albatross, and that meeting stories should be the next item up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Jay’s answer was relayed by Jack Lail, the online content boss at The Knoxville News-Sentinel — a Scripps paper. Jack also queried Don Kausler Jr. — editor of another Scripps paper, the Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail –who seemed to agree with Jay:
One thing we have let go of is a daily lifestyles section, which has enabled us to restructure our newsroom. We have merged our city desk and lifestyles staff into a content staff that now focuses almost exclusively on local news, and the focus is on reporting news Web first, as instantly as possible.
Where once we published a Life section seven days a week, we now publish an entertainment tab on Thursday, a handful of Faith & Values pages on Saturday and a page called Vibe on Sunday. We still have puzzles, syndicated advice columns. comics and TV grids, but we aren’t burning staff time or running up freelance expenses by producing lifestyle features.
Anderson is certainly not the only paper to kill its features section. The St. Petersburg Times, just last month cut back its section, Floridian, to Sundays only. And in April, the Times folded its business section inside the metro section.
The Times, in turn, is not the only paper to discontinue a free-standing biz section. The Orange County Register did it earlier this year. I’ll bet you can name lots of others. The Columbus Dispatch. The Denver Post. The Winston-Salem Journal.
Last fall, Arizona State professor Tim McGuire lamented this trend:
Obviously the question becomes, “well, have our business sections actually monitored the power of business?†Too often the answer is no, but that does not mean we ought to drop business sections. It means we ought to fix the bloomin’ things.
Editors and publishers are too often looking at challenges and deciding to eliminate rather than innovate… By putting short-term profits ahead of building a news franchise which monitors the awesome power of American business, the Suits leave little doubt that reinventing newspapers does not include responsibility or a sense of duty to readers.
Well, hey, I hear you say. If this is the trend, why don’t we just not print a paper at all? Just think of the expenses we’ll save!
Sorry, Chuckles. Someone has beaten you to it.
The daily paper in Sumter, S.C. — The Item — announced recently it would trim costs by eliminating its Monday edition.
Item publisher Jack Osteen says the Monday newspaper costs more to produce than it generates. Subscribers will get discounts because of the cutback, which is to go into effect July 1.
The newspaper says keeping subscriptions affordable was increasingly difficult because of energy and newsprint costs and the economic downturn. …The Item will continue to report news on Mondays on its Web site.
Which, of course older readers and poor readers — the ones who count on their newspaper the most — don’t use. Or don’t have access to.
Weekday circulation averaged 18,767 last year, down from just under 20,000 in 2006.
Jim DuPlessis of South Carolina’s big capital city newspaper, The State, reported:
The Item circulates in Sumter, Clarendon and Lee counties. Most markets that size would publish five days a week, but The Item decided to go to seven days a week 21 years ago in the belief the market would catch up, but so far it hasn’t, [said general manager Larry Miller].
The Item is still family owned: The current publisher is the great-grandson of its founder, who cranked up the paper in 1894.
Find the May Carnival of Journalism here. Find Jack Lail’s thoughts here. Find Tim McGuire’s essay on business sections here.
Find Jay’s blog here.
June 9th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Boy, this was a depressing post. Sure, I know all about the opportunities in chaos quotes that abound in times such as these and for the most part think they are accurate. Still . . . this was a depressing post.
June 9th, 2008 at 9:45 am
I agree about dumping the wire. People who care about national and international news already got it from the Internet yesterday.
What I strongly disagree with is the commment about police beats and meetings. Readers LOVE police beat — it’s like celebrity news, only people they know. List names, sure — it’s the 2nd-most-scanned part of the paper after the obits. But then, take the most interesting reports and write them up, juicy details and all. I know Daytona has more than its fair share of wacky criminals — and heartbreaking tales of homeless men getting $208 fines for digging for food in a Dumpster. But these things get readers fired up, and to cut that would be a mistake.
And if we don’t cover city meetings, what the hell is our function? You want to talk about newspapers as the gatekeepers of democracy. . .if we don’t tell people what’s going on at their local city government level — for those who won’t, or can’t, attend the often mind-numbing meetings — who will? Advances are also very important. I’ve seen city agendas, and even for a reasonably intelligent person like me, they’re HARD to digest sometimes. You need a reporter who knows the city to call the development director and say, “What does this mean for the CRA?” and have them explain it in English, then tell the readers, “Hey, they want to raise your taxes to put in more trees on Main St. — if you disagree, come out and say so!”
People will care if you tell them what’s going on. But they often won’t, or can’t, or don’t know how to, find it out for themselves. If we don’t cover the actions of local government, let’s just fill it all with Paris Hilton and rename ourselves The National Enquirer.
June 9th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
There has got to be better answer than taking away the wire. If newspapers are going to pare down content, try reducing the number of pages devoted to nation/world and business. Why are newspapers running four to five pages of wire pages when they can be easily reduced. Also, don’t forget the sports section relies heavily on wire to fill pages in the their sections. Sports readers love reading what happen in last night’s game or want to read the agate page just to see how their team is doing. Taking away the wire could really alienate readers and wonder if their newspaper really cares anymore.
June 9th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Yes, it is getting worse. The State will be eliminating the Saturday Life & Style section starting July 5. I don’t want to be the one taking calls on that . . .
Readers have already been commenting how small the paper is these days and killing another section, while it saves money in the short term will permanently drive off our readers in the future. There will eventually be nothing to read, so why subscribe?
June 9th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
If there’s any silver lining, it’s that maybe this environment will lead to the one innovation that is well overdue: rethinking the way we section the paper.
June 9th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Bonita, you’re right. Personally, I’d be delighted to see us devise production processes that permit different people in the same block to have a different set of section choices every day. Niche products wrapped in the core product, instead of orbiting it.
That said, I still don’t see anyone taking up the cause for the things I cited as peeves: staff-produced illustrations or poster features fronts. I thought better creative minds than me (and I know plenty of those) eschewed both long ago. Yet I still see them, a lot.
June 10th, 2008 at 12:34 am
I don’t know that I would say newspapers should completely give up staff-produced illustrations, but I do think outsourcing the bulk of the workload to freelancers is a good thing (full-disclosure: I do a lot of freelance work so I am not, by any means, unbiased on this topic).
However, I’ve long been an advocate of this even before I started freelancing as much as I do these days. I just think this methodology gives voice to a broader array of styles, range and emotion on a daily basis if a newspaper (or any publication for that matter) has a reliable stable of freelancers they can turn to for different projects.
It’s also been my experience that full-time illustrators are slowly leaving the industry, whether they’re retiring, taking buyouts or being pushed to develop new skill sets that are considered more valuable in this day and age. It’s a trend that will continue as the emphasis on reallocating resources to other areas like the web will mean less time for staffers to produce illustrations.
My colleague at the Post-Dispatch, Will Sullivan, wrote about this very thing though his emphasis was actually on outsourcing web/interactive projects.
I think you’ll see more and more papers start to outsource assignments in a lot of areas in the future, whether it’s illustrations, multimedia, information graphics, etc. It’s just less expensive to operate that way, and we all know the folks in the executive offices are counting every penny.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Hi all - Thanks for the links, Charles.
I’d love to hear answers from print designers on the question I asked the Carnival participants:
What daily task would you drop completely to do something innovative, or for online training, or for more time to design section fronts, if that’s your thing?
June 10th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
We eliminated page headers such as Obits, News & Liesure and State/Nation a few months back. Why? So we could go down in pages if advertising didn’t justify it. We still run all the information. It just isn’t under a big sign. It’s worked well so far. The publisher is happier, we have more room and more lattitude to place stories.
This is a smaller paper anyway (10,000 daily plus Sunday) and puts out between 12 and 18 pages a day. Sunday still has a feature section.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Just wanted to add to this that the Rockford Register Star actually just started a stand alone business section and the graphics section of the paper is expanding. Not that we (them, I’m just an intern) are doing amazingly well, but I’d just like to add some sunshine into this “doomy” discussion.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Oh, that doesn’t surprise me, Chris. In this economy, with revenues drying up and newspapers hacking away at their two most valuable assets — talent and content — leave it to Linda Grist Cunningham to actually find a way to expand and improve her paper.
.
Why isn’t this woman running her own chain?
June 13th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I don’t know what to think of all this. Outsourcing all illustrations AND informational graphics? I’m screwed. I also have been freelancing for years now. I don’t pursue it aggressively, but it’s been the equivalent of a part-time income at best.
Where is the individuality is everyone is running Brad Holland, Anita Kunz or John Telford illustrations (magnificent as they may be, like how I threw you in there John?)? I don’t get it. But, adapt we must if that’s the way the economy is steering things.
Thanks for the heads up?
June 16th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
To Coffeymaker:
If you can reduce the wire pages, why not just cut them out altogether? You pay for the service itself, no matter how little you use it. I personally don’t want to pay a million dollars a year (not an exaggeration) for two pages of briefs and some scores I can get for free on the Internet.
Diehard sports fans know their team’s score before the paper hits the driveway. What sports fans in your town REALLY want is more coverage of their local sports. And with the wire money freed up, you can hire lots of sports reporters to get that job done.
In fact, sports should have the msot reporters of any department. Why? Because you have to sit through a whole game to write about it, and you can’t go to more than one game at a time. Beef up the sports staff to give the readers what they can’t get anywhere else, and dump that useless, redundant wire.
June 17th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Denise,
Let’s send reporters to the local games and beef up the reporting but let’s not forget that the away games are just as important to cover as well. That’s where wire comes in. Having the wire can save a lot of money especially if you don’t have the staff or the funds to cover an event.
Let’s not forget about breaking news events especially the Super Bowl, the World Series or even NASCAR? What about the photos that move across the wire? If you drop these stories from the newspaper, then you will see your readership go down the hill.
Wire can be redundant but that’s why you have talented editors to weed through the clutter and choose the best stories for the next edition. The wire is probably the best and most reliable service any newspaper can subscribe to.