Charles Apple

Monday, the News Journal of Pensacola, Fla., began putting out two front pages a night: One for home delivery and one for single-copy sales.

Deputy managing editor for presentation Kim Thomas was kind enough to send me today’s fronts. Home-delivery is on the left and single-copy is on the right:

Kim also answered a few questions for us:

Q. May I presume the home-delivery edition has earlier deadlines? How much earlier?

A. Actually, we don’t have earlier deadlines. They just pop the single-copy on at the end of the run.

Q. Did you add designers to be able to handle the extra work? Or were you able to absorb it with current staffing?

A. We absorbed it, sort of, by being a flexible staff. We’ve shuffled tasks to free up designers, and we’re cutting back on some stuff to get it done. Right now, I’m doing the single-copy front and cutting back on the digital part of my job. When others take over the single-copy front, we’ve targeted other tasks we want to shuffle around or cut back.

Q. Most of the reaction posted in the PNJ web site seems to be negative. I’m going to guess the actual reaction around town has been more positive. Have you heard anything much yet? Or is it still too early?

A. It is too early, but we haven’t received a single complaint about the change. That in itself says something in our community. Our people don’t hesitate to let us know when they’re upset. Our hawkers said today, for example, was the strongest day they’ve had since our price increase a few weeks ago. We’ll see if we can maintain that when the ‘new’ wears off.

On the web site, much of the negative feedback came before we launched the single-copy front. Also, the tone there is always significantly different from our core print audience.

The problem in Pensacola, it seems, is a huge, huge gap between the very conservative adult population and the younger generations that are more… shall we say socially liberal in their thinking. This disparity, the PNJ reports, is the reason why 53 percent of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 recently said in a poll they were likely to leave Escambia County in the next five years.

The PNJ made its changes with the hope of appealing, visually, to these kids. Without cheezing off the older readers. Something we’ve all struggled with.

In an unbylined editorial, the PNJ reported Sunday:

From a newspaper standpoint, generations X and Y are very different from baby boomers. Some say the younger generations will not read newspapers, but in Pensacola that’s not necessarily true. We do, however, know they don’t read them the same way as boomers and the parents of boomers.

So we’re going to try something different. We know the largest group of single-copy buyers are younger. What we want to do is make the front page reflect that audience; yes, of that market. A bit of capitalism never hurt anyone.

And maybe, just maybe, by giving that market a different look in our newspaper, and in some cases different stories, we might end up serving our new generation of readers a bit better. It might not work, we know that. But we’re going to give it a shot.

Can our community redesign its front page to make it more attractive to younger residents? Like our front-page experiment, I guess we’ll find out. But it won’t come in more bars or carbon copies (ah, the boomer in me) of Seville and the beach. It will come in attitude — one of more tolerance, for starters. People need to understand that for every hate-filled letter about gays on the beach during Memorial Day, another kid, another straight kid, who understands the value of tolerance is wondering if this is the place for him or her.

That is the consequence, like it or not.

Very interesting. This reminds me of the 2005 experiment in Harrisburg, Pa., in which the Patriot-News published a snappy, parallel free tabloid version of its daily paper. The Patriot-News pulled the plug after only five months.

Read the Sunday News Journal piece here. Read PNJ editor Dick Schneider’s blog entry about the change here. And, as you’d imagine, the Gannett Blog is all over it. Find their coverage here.

Want to see larger views of those covers? Tap the thumbnails:

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 11:26 am and is filed under Industry woes, Innovative ideas, News design, Newspapers, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.