The Courier Journal and Winning Horse Races
May 2, 2010
Post-Derby day. Sunday newspaper day. Depressing, and it is only 9 am.
A near miss in New York City excited the NPR news team this morning (May 2, 2010). Nary a word about Greece, Spain, and Portugal, however. To get the details, I had to fire up my laptop and check out online news sources.
I walked to the end of my driveway to retrieve the Courier-Journal, where I used to work. I also picked up my home delivery copy of the New York Times. The NYT was wet because the blue plastic bag was not closed, so water happily nestled in the newsprint. I could tell at a glance that the NYT closed before the problem in Times Square was news. I tossed the paper aside to dry.
The C-J was the ad section and the soft features. No front page. What was delivered dripped water on the kitchen floor. My wife told me to sort the newspaper in the garage. Fun. The Derby was yesterday and I was curious about the coverage of the event. Despite the nose dive in the original content in the C-J over the last 20 years, reporters do hoof and gallop around the Derby in search of “stories”. Well, mostly it is “who got rich,” “who showed up”, and “who got in trouble”. No joy. A call to the C-J’s hotline triggered a recording that told me there were production problems with the Sunday paper. No big deal. There’s online, Twitter, and Facebook. The story was online here “Production Problems Prevent Delivery of Full Sunday Courier Journal.” I wonder if there were cutbacks and efficiencies applied that made one of the highest circulation editions of the year fail? Like aircraft maintenance, no one knows what shifts have been made until the toilets don’t work, the flights can’t leave the gate, or the pilot reports a “slight issue and some paperwork”.
The one section of the C-J that showed up is called “Forum”, and what do you know? The front page of section H for Sunday, May 2, 2010, ran a story with this headline: “Rethink: Newspapers are better off than you may think.” The author is a fellow named Arnold Garson, whom I don’t know. His picture shows a kindly visage in dark suit with red tie and the slug: “The Courier Journal remains a strong and credible local news provider and a profitable business today.”
Since my Sunday paper was missing the front page, the sports section, and some other bits, I am not on board with the assertion about “a strong and credible local news provider.” I think the “profitable business” part is really the point.
I read the article, which purports to be the text of a speed delivered on April 7, 2010, to the Downtown Kiwanis Club meeting. The article is a long piece, running about 80 column inches. If Mr. Garson read this speech, I am delighted I was not in attendance.
Summarizing the talk is easy: C-J makes money, reaches more than 85 percent of the readers, and makes money. Oh, I repeated myself. Sorry, but that point jumps out a couple of times in the text of the talk.
I noted some other highlights as well:
- The C-J is performing better than other newspapers; that is, “less bad” is “good”
- Delivery of the hard copy to “outlying areas” has been trimmed
- Ad rates and subscription prices are going up
- TV news viewers are older than C-J newspaper readers
- A 100 million people read newspapers.
You get the idea.
The C-J’s local Web site attracts 1.3 million unique users per month and generates 16 million page views. The C-J has achieved 380,000 mobile impressions per month. That’s good. The questions I had were:
- What’s a “unique”? What’s a page view” What’s a mobile impression?
- How does this compare with Facebook’s 400 million users in early 2010, up from 150 million in early 2009?
- What’s the relationship between circulation decline and uptake of the C-J’s Web site?
I could crank out more questions, but I want to jump to the wrap up of the talk. This is the assertion I find most interesting:
Ninety-nine percent of the nation’s newspapers, including The Courier-Journal will survive this recession based on our own core strengths, our determination to transform our business model and through the lift we will get from the recovery itself.
I am not sure how to make the leap from 99 percent survivability to “our own core strengths”. The core strengths seem to be advertising. I am not convinced the C-J does much local news. I understand determination. The assertion about the recovery seems to be a “maybe” argument. But it is tough to get coverage of the European financial crisis based on my reading the C-J every day. I have to turn elsewhere for that information.
Why do I think the talk is baloney? First, I fund the Seed2020 meet ups for women- and minority-owned businesses. I know that none of the more than 20 companies featured in the meet ups since November 2009 have been covered in the C-J. A couple of these businesses are real stories with solid news value. Nope. No coverage. One can argue that the weakening Business First, American Cities Business Journal publication is taking up the slack. Nope. The Seed2020 events show that there are solid news stories that are just not covered. I find the C-J argument on ground as muddy as the race track yesterday.
Second, without the C-J’s front page or the coverage of the NYT event in Times Square, I question the value of the newspaper as a timely source of information. Traditional deadlines and production problems underscore the irrelevance of the “business model” that will keep 99 percent of the newspapers in business. Mr. Garson does not provide any reference points for the number of newspapers in business in 1900, the number in 2000, and the number today. I do touch on this issue in Google: The Digital Gutenberg and won’t repeat the decline, consolidation, and homogeneity referenced in my monograph.
Third, the folks I know who are 55 and younger are not into newspapers. I watched how my son’s friends, now in their 30s, looked at the sports pages and their iPads and Macbooks. They talked to one another, chatted on their mobile devices, and sent text messages. This behavior took place as we sat at the kitchen table. The newspaper was marginalized.
Bottom-line: Timeliness, medium, and business model are intermingling with the DNA of people who don’t find the hard copy newspaper relevant. The C-J’s Arnold Garson is putting a positive spin on a reality that does not exist in our household.
Of course, I live in one of those outlying areas in Kentucky. I can log on to Newsnow.co.uk and learn about Europe. I can check Craigslist.com for ads. I can scan my Twitter stream to learn about the horrific accident that took place at Highway 42 and Highway 841 at 6 45 am.
No C-J needed for that. And I used to work there. Big changes to which the C-J and papers like the NYT are struggling to adapt. Like the long shots in the Derby yesterday, only one horse won. In my opinion, the C-J and the NYT are both entering the media race next year with long odds. Just my opinion and it is as valuable as a tip at the track.
Stephen E Arnold, May 2, 2010
Unsponsored post.
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
