Posted on 07/21/2008 2:10:07 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.
The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.
Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.
This description is a composite. It is based on face-to-face interviews conducted at newspapers across the country and the results of a detailed survey of senior newsroom executives. In total, more than 250 newspapers participated. It is, we believe, the most systematic effort yet to examine the changing nature of the resources in American newspaper newsrooms at a critical time. It is an attempt to document and quantify cutbacks and innovations that have generally been known only anecdotally.
(Excerpt) Read more at journalism.org ...
“The crossword puzzle has shrunk...”
LOL!
But the entire institution, from publisher to paperboy, remains as bigoted and biased as it has always been, and consequently, its market will continue to shrink and its influence wane until it is fit only for absorbing toxic spills. A fitting ending for a profession that has become nothing but a toxic spill itself.
I worked for a major daily newspaper, actually in the news photo department, but with the shrinking of staff of late I was given more and more tasks normally done by other departments. First it was the weather page, then the stock market report, and finally the crossword puzzle. You can make the major mistakes in the stocks or on the weather page, but a single simple error on the crossword puzzle and you're doomed. I'm not kidding. I never expected the rage that people would experience and express when the crossword was not perfect, or we accidentally re-ran a puzzle.
Each of the features such as stocks, the crossword puzzle, the weather page, all of the comics, etc. each come from a separate syndicate. Of course each has it's own way of doing things and I'm convinced each of them has a full time employee whose only job is to make sure that nothing they do is done like anyone else does it! The worst is the comics. Add to that having to deal with a couple of wire news services plus AP photos and it can get really demanding.
Just a friendly warning that you should make sure your reference to the crossword puzzle includes the </sarc> tag. Or as they would put it “four-letter abbreviation used by FreePers to make certain readers understand the tongue-in-cheek quality of a posting”.
...the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared...
TV listings are almost a moot point. 95% of everything they’re running is a re-run, of either a crappy TV show or a “B” action movie, interrupted by three and a half minutes of ads every seven minutes.
Thank you for the chance to clarify I was not laughing at the crossword puzzle. I was laughing at the guy shrinking the crossword puzzle. I have nothing against crossword puzzles. I think crossword puzzles are great!
I’ve got to believe the loss of classified ads to online services has hurt significantly, too. My local paper’s classified section is a sliver of what it was ten years ago.
Find this a bit difficult to accept as the two papers common to our area offer Sunday subscriptions with Wednesday through Saturday thrown in for free.
When I told one that I no longer wanted the "free" editions, they didn't stop. I have been getting them for over a year now.
The other paper? Well, I tried to tell them I no longer wanted it.
But they keep sending me bills, which I throw away. They keep calling at least twice a week, even though I have told them not to bother me anymore.
At least caller ID saves me from talking to them now.
And they have now been delivering the paper Wednesday through Sunday for the past six months and I have not paid a dime for any of it.
I bet both papers claim me as an "avid reader" of their product.
Whew! That was close.
Insightful read.
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