I enjoy reading new recipes, and occasionally trying them out. But most of the food and drink section in the newspaper is really the “same old same old”. Or it’s “latest fad ingredient in every course of the meal”. No, I don’t want freshly cracked black pepper in my cookies or in my cocoa. That’s just WRONG. I’d say about 80% of the food and drink section could be cut out from the Dallas Morning News, and it would be a better paper.
The DMN has a weekly fashion section, too. I realize that Dallas is one of the big fashion cities, but I don’t think that the DMN needs to have a weekly fashion section. Let the rag rags gush about Designer X’s bold new vision for this season. Very few people who are not in the industry really care about this. And the paper runs a model search each year, which is basically just advertising for a particular model agency. Again, about 80% of this coverage is useless, except to a very small niche of people.
Sports. I realize that this is Texas, but there is really no excuse for putting sports news on the front page, ABOVE THE FOLD, and dedicating most of the front page to the outcome of a game. I am sure that there is something else that happened that is just as interesting to most people. I am not convinced that sports news needs to have TWO sections, either. I do think that the DMN should feature more articles about just what the Cowboys owner has gotten the tax payers to pay for THIS time, though. Is it another stadium? And just how many people did he evict from their homes, using eminent domain, to get that stadium built?
I will also include my grumble that the DMN discontinued their weekly science news section some years ago. Damn it, most of the articles that they printed were about things that actually affected people!
They need to get rid of some of their columnists. There’s one who basically is of the opinion that only white, Republican, and either Protestant or Catholic men are worthy of having jobs and opinions that matter. If you are not in this group, then shut up and obey your betters. Another one is apparently trying to become the next Fox political commentator. I always envision him with froth and spittle coming from his mouth when I read his columns. And the DMN has a column called “Balance of Opinion”, where someone has snipped bits of syndicated columnists, mashed them together, and then added her own comments. Get rid of all three of these columnists, and the DMN could run more syndicated columnists on a regular basis…and have a better balance, too.
That’s what people thought when they started being sold in Spain. Nowadays there’s as much of a ranking in respectability there as in the ones that charge.
It’s interesting that overseas, there are respected, free newspapers- The Sun in Malaysia springs to mind. But in Australia, the free newspapers are (generally) held in fairly low regard, although some of them actually have surprisingly good local journalism in them.
I’ve been thinking about this question for several years now, and Jonathan Chance has said pretty much what I was coming in here to say.
I think national consolidation of papers is what is killing them. The more this continues, the sooner newspapers will die.
It’s not that newspapers aren’t selling ads, they’re just not selling enough ads to cover the massive amount of corporate overhead they’ve built up over the years. Hell, I don’t see much reason for newspapers to have big fancy offices anymore. Most reporters and sales people can work from home or the field.
Plus, I think the idea of putting identical content online that is found in the print edition is stupid too. There should be two editions of newspapers: print and online, and rarely should the two meet. Online should be reserved for interactive and “social media,” videos, and up-to-the-minute news. The print edition should have longer, deeper features and investigative pieces.
Lose the broadsheet. It’s cumbersome and outdated. Most people like to read newspapers on the go these days, and it’s hard to do so when you’ve got a giant broadsheet newspaper you’re trying to fold while sitting next to someone on a plane or train.
And to further echo Jonathan Chance, newspapers desperately need to do “community building:” sponsor festivals, town halls, and other events, as well as donate to community organizations. Not only does this create good will, it ensures the success of local non-profits (theater groups, public education, etc), but the events they sponsor will create positive, community-based things for them to report on (a music festival, a town hall with the mayor, etc).
It has existed for well over 100 years. It’s called the Economist http://www.economist.com/ . Unlike Time & Newsweek, it’s not written at a third-grade level either. It may be published by the Brits, but it has far better coverage of the US than US newpapers or magazines have. Plus very complete worldwide coverage. And zero fluff.
Perhaps they know their audience better than you do. As far as I can tell, those folks represent mainstream opinion in Dallas. That’s pretty appalling to you & me, but Texas is like that.
Amen! I forgot to mention that in my earlier diatribe. The Phoenix paper does the same stupid thing almost every day, and we don’t have a decent team in town other than the women’s basketball team. Which they seldom even mention until they win a championship.
And it is very amusing that when it actually rains here, they have front-page pictures of it raining. Big news.
I worked in a city newspaper office for a couple of years, and this hits the nail on the head. Absolutely there were people who not only begrudged having to file an online version of their story, but reallyreallyreally missed doing the whole thing on a typewriter. **BKReporter **wasn’t joking.
At the newspaper where I worked, the second paragraph also held true. Unfortunately, it holds true in a lot of industries and companies. But it ain’t helping the newspapers, that’s for sure.
As long as I have a way to opt-out. I already have too damn many cable TV channels I don’t watch. I wish I could get a la carte cable TV service. A three-inch thick newspaper on my doorstep every Sunday would be heaved right into the kindling pile. It’s a waste of trees.
Wait. The newspaper business is being hard hit by the recession. But those newspapers that concentrated on making money running a newspapers are surviving and even thriving. The ones that got into trouble are the ones that invested heavily in non-newspaper businesses (usually real estate).
Second, they should concentrate on the things they do well – local news. You can’t get decent local news anywhere*, and newspapers need to fill that niche. Around here, the local paper is doing well with a series of articles and columns on corruption within the school board and administration. If newspapers find stories like that, they’ll do fine.
*TV news merely takes the articles the local newspaper has published.
Bring back real journalism, real reporting. What Paris Hilton or the people from The Hills are doing is not news and never has been. How Diebold is rigging elections or Halliburton is collecting Iraq profits or Burris is accepting bribes (all of these are hypothetical, off-the-top-of-my-head ideas) or what have you is. These are the stories that should be covered, in depth and with great rigor.
When The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have better investigative journalists with better thought out viewpoints and sharper criticism than the people on the news, that should serve as a wake-up call to newsies. Sadly, it hasn’t.
So you’d accept, say, the Washington Times’s publishers’ definitions? But wouldn’t, say, the New York Times’s be quite different? So which one do you choose? That’s the sort of thing that was going through my mind.
Well the Wall Street Journal does pretty good. But they have a full online service with very limited free content.
Still I am on board with the need to focus on local issues. My local area is pretty big, but the Inquirer could cover that plus Harrisburg but dropping most of the wire service crap that anyone can get for free online. They could also 86 about half the sports staff. Since they tend to recycle each others opinions anyway, you wouldn’t lose anything.
Not sure I would be devoting space to the community columns though. Newspapers are spending far too much money on newsprint for stuff with very limited appeal as it is.
I think that it’s because the first one I mentioned is on the editorial board, and I’m pretty sure that the newspaper has business connections with the second columnist, or at least with the radio station he has a daily show on. It’s possible that the Old Money in Dallas really, really does like the first columnist, and wishes that they could get away with saying that only rich white social and fiscal conservative Anglo Saxon Protestant males are first class citizens, and everyone else is second class, in public.
I agree 100%. I thought that was what USA Today was going to do when they started.
Have national and international news, local sports, important local news, crosswords, funnies, and obits. Then work on making it more readable. Maybe move to a tabloid size so it is easier to read on the can and more than one person can read it at the breakfast table.
The problem is that investigative journalism is hard, depressing, and (generally) not very rewarding- instead of being lauded as “Watchdogs” the Journalists get labelled “troublemakers” or “nosy” or “shit-stirrers”.
Or, they can write stories about Psuedolebrities and what happened on TV last night.
Remember, your average journalist in Australia doesn’t get paid a hell of a lot more than someone who works in retail management position. So I can understand why “Hard News” stories are on the decline.
This is a good point. A hard hitting investigative piece can take months to research and in the end may not even yield anything. At a time when the industry is laying off people left and right, most newsrooms just can’t afford to dedicate the necessary resources to those types of stories.
In many places you may have one reporter covering city hall. And that one reporter is going to be so busy covering the normal workaday business of the city, as well as political campaigns every year or two, that they’re probably not going to have the time to investigate any shady dealings that may be going on.
The reporter may know that there’s corruption taking place, but there’s a big difference between “knowing” and actually gathering up enough evidence to publish a solid story. And all that takes time. It’s like the cop who just knows that a suspect is guilty, but can’t put him behind bars until he has enough evidence.
This is completely different from your earlier post. Even the publishers (Moonies) of the Washington Times aren’t idiots. They know perfectly well they aren’t mainstream. All publishers know, everyone last one of them, what is left, center and right. If they stick to one extreme, they’re not going to be able to compete with those that go for the middle. Smart businesses make smart decisions. Needless to say, that actually doesn’t happen very often.
And the New York Times hasn’t even had a token liberal component in years. The two papers are not all that different. There is virtually no liberal mainstream press left.
