Dead-Tree Papers, Or: Have I Told You the Story of Free Milk and the Cow?

Based on some conversations and random readings of newspaper articles and blog posts, it seems that a lot of newspapers are in financial trouble. Some of that is due to declining circulation, some because idiot owners used their papers as cash cows in the 1990s and now the bills are coming due. But I have a few ideas to help save some of them:

1) What is your beat? Here is a general rule: Concentrate on covering the areas where your paper is circulated. If you have reporters assigned outside of your circulation area, then they should cover those subjects which impact your area. This probably means that you have a couple of reporters in the state capitol and maybe Washington, D.C., who are tasked to cover that stuff. Get your national and world news from the wire services.

2) If you can get it from the wire services, you don't need anyone on your staff covering it. You don't need a TV critic or a movie critic, period. If you have one or more of those critters, reassign them or get rid of them. (Of course, if the TV critic is the no-account offspring of the publisher's idiot sibling, then never mind.)

3) Fuck the local symphony. Those who have season tickets will go regardless. Find a local classic music buff and link to his or her blog, or pay the buff as a stringer. If you are the publisher of a newspaper and your editor sends the classic music critic along with the symphony for a concert series in Beijing, think about finding another editor. The only times you should be reporting on the local symphony is when there has been felonious conduct or there is a juicy litigation underway.

4) You probably don't need a theatre critic, for that matter. Send a general assignment reporter to cover the opening of the local high school extravaganza, if you must.

5) Cover local government thoroughly. Yes, it can be boring to go to evening meetings of the planning and zoning board or the school board or the various meetings of the town board or the town selectmen, but suck it up and send your reporters. They don't want to go, find new ones. I am serious about this one. Local government is full of fuckery that directly effects your readers and the only time that those clowns will ever clean up their acts is when they have to read about their shenanigans in print. No local politician likes the idea of his or her neighbors reading the paper over morning coffee and laughing at them. The politicians won't like it, tell them to go read NY Times v. Sullivan.

6) Cover the courts and the cops. Have somebody skim through the complaints and answers filed. Those are public documents, as is the police blotter.

7) The Internet is largely your enemy. (Would you buy gasoline if you got it for free?) Sure, have a website, but put your local content behind a paid-subscriber-only wall (an "online" subscriber fee", not just a benefit for a print subscription). Put up the headlines, if you must ("Local County Commissioner Arrested in Sex Sting"), but not the frigging stories!

Your advertisers in the paper are your real customers; they're the ones whose ad monies pay for the paper's production. You need to deliver what they want, which is people reading the frakking newspaper. To do that, you need to give your readership what they cannot easily get elsewhere on the Internet, and that means what, Gentle Reader?

That's right: Local news. Local content.

Otherwise, you guys are going to become obsolete. And then I'd have to buy mats for the cat food dishes and use paper towels for lining the floor prior to cleaning weapons.