A Reply: Going Free and Tabloid Is Not Nearly Enough

By: Jay Harn I both agree and disagree with Mark Moore's recent column on stopping the circulation plunge. I think he is right that we, as an industry, need to continue to make sure our product itself is user-friendly. The tabloid size is well-liked and it is hard to argue against free papers when we are giving away content free every day on the Internet.

But a smaller size and free papers alone are not going to save this industry.

My career has been in community dailies and weeklies and I think the smaller papers are doing a lot of things right. Moore is perfectly correct about the importance of local news and events along with reader interaction. At conferences throughout the nation, the larger papers talk about the importance of local news to their franchise, but in reality, unless a local congressman is being ousted, I have yet to see a major daily run absolutely nothing but local news on their front page. We do and our readers praise us for it. Do we also run national and international news, yes, but it's mostly in brief form on departmentalized inside pages. We have a good package, but we emphasize the features that appear exclusively in our pages.

It all comes down to making sure our newspapers are not just read, but essential. Nothing can be taken for granted anymore. We need to take every reader's negative comment seriously and act on it. A daily newspaper does have an obligation to its readers to keep them informed, but we need to continually remind ourselves why our readers subscribe to our newspapers in the first place -- local news, local names, local events, local sports, local features, local photos, and local opinion.

Take a look at the front pages on the newseum.com web site and every day 90 percent of the daily newspapers in this country have basically the exact same national and international wire stories on their front pages. So everyone says that local news is our savior, but pack mentality still seems to run the ship. Too often we still believe that the daily newspaper is the news entity that first informs an average reader of a national or international event. For once, we finally need to realize that by the time most of our readers get their paper in the morning, they most likely know more about the previous day's national and international events from other sources than we can imagine ? many from our own web pages.

Should the event still be reported in our pages? Of course, but in a form that makes our readers feel informed and satisfied, not in the standard way we have been doing for years that simply makes us look like we are living a day late and a dollar short.

Mr. Moore also states that we should maybe do away with editorials. I disagree. Yes, local letters and columns are instrumental in building long-lasting readership, but doing away with a newspaper's obligation to take a stand itself takes away one of our best drawing cards ? community leadership. I fully believe that much of the loss of readership major dailies are facing can also be blamed on lukewarm opinion pages that never stir the pot or again over focus on national or international events, when local events are what may really matter to the reader. A good community controversy deserves plenty of ink, and a good newspaper deserves a strong opinion page that can help the community it serves see some light through an awful lot of darkness.

But I also believe there is more to the circulation slides than just the news hole. I think that the reliability of our delivery is an issue no matter what appears on our news pages. We all know that it does not matter one bit what kind of content we produce if we can't get it to the subscriber's doorstep not only on time, but consistently on time.

Over my 25-year career, there have been two constants that I have heard every time I have spoken before local groups, no matter where I was working. Questions are always brought up in two areas: Why is my paper late; and why was it that some particular local story did not make it into the newspaper.

We continually talk about bringing younger readers on board, and this is an important topic, but we also must remember to make sure we continually meet the needs of our current subscriber base or we have no future.

Of all the media that exist, newspaper reading is the most active. We are not passive. One must see the need to make an effort to read us and then actually take action to do so. Too often we give potential and current readers too many easy excuses not to make the effort. In short, we shoot ourselves in the foot.

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Related E&P column by Mark Moore: To Reverse Circ Plunge: Give Readers What They Want