This is just about the most challenging and possibly true sentence I’ve read in weeks:
Two fat newspapers each week and a robust web platform will have more impact than five or six skinny papers and a site that’s not foremost in the newsroom’s mind.
Martin Langeveld, who blogs at News After Newspapers, makes the case that local newspapers are on the road to ruin if they continue to publish every day in print. His recommendation: Print two big papers weekly, on Thursday and Saturday. Profits do shrink under his new model, but at the end of five years, he says they’re much more robust than they would have been following the existing 7-day model to its slow death.
I do hope he posts his spreadsheets, though, so we can all poke and prod at the assumptions.
People like Langeveld are reinventing an industry, idea by idea.
Read the entire proposal here.
Gus says
November 18, 2008 at 8:33 pmthe last readership/circulation numbers that i've seen at my paper show that online readership is (generally and excluding wacky events) heaviest in the early part of the week and relatively slow by the end of the week and on the weekends.
conversely, our circulation is heaviest from thursday to Sunday (as people get the long-weekend subscriptions). this trend always made me think that a newspaper might be able to drop publishing (or severely reduce) its Monday-Wednesday print edition, and go full Web on those days. And then offer a tightly edited newspaper at the end of the week and on weekends that are geared toward analytical thinkpieces, trends, weekend sports and entertainment.
instead, on at least mondays and tuesdays, the paper is so thin that you wouldn't use it to catch a sneeze. readers notice that and shake their heads.
doing something like this, i think, would also more concretely focus a company's efforts on pushing the value of its interactive advertising on its advertisers. it could also help drive up the cost of interactive ads, if you're taking one medium off the table a few days a week, and telling your clients you gotta go with us on the web on those days. but i'm just hypothesizing there… i'm not an ad guy. 😉
business directory says
November 20, 2008 at 1:18 amProfits do shrink under his new model, but at the end of five years, he says they’re much more robust than they would have been following the existing 7-day model to its slow death.