Wednesday, April 18, 2007
The Two-Newspaper Town and the Future of Papers
Given your correspondent's background in newspapers, it's worth sharing a shout of joy that the Seattle newspapers settled their disagreements. Seattle will, for the forseeable future, be a two-newspaper town. (And more than two papers, if you count the weekly papers) That matters because the Seattle papers often write about regional and state issues. Their quality is important.
Most of us assumed the Seattle papers would go the way of The Oregonian or The Los Angeles Times: one gigantic mega-paper trying to be all things. Such papers can often do a mega-story that covers one issue really well; but the casualty is that local stories suffer.
It's clear from the settlement that the Seattle publishers realize the days of new mega-papers are gone; the Internet has forced papers to think locally and appreciate local community stories again. The News Tribune, for example, has created a 'neighborhoods' blog.
One funny aspect surfaces in today's Times. The reason I share this link is that many of you will remember that The Lakewood Journal was a tabloid-shaped paper. We occasionally got kidded about this, since much of the trash out there masquerading as papers, such as the National Enquirer, is in tabloid format. I will never forget a News Tribune solicitation to advertisers that took a swipe at our paper by noting their broadsheet format was "more credible."
So it's a chuckle that apparently the Seattle P-I is at least thinking of going to a tabloid format.
There have been a number of stories published about the Seattle arrangement, and none of them reflect a sunny future for papers. Check out this article from The Times just after the settlement.
It's no surprise that you are seeing online papers like The Suburban Times arise. As another example of the genre, when you have a second, visit this Seattle version of an online newspaper.
Final note: All of the Washington papers are taking various stabs are trying to make sense of the new order. Perhaps the most publicly thoughtful is the Spokesman-Review of Spokane. If you are interested in the future of papers, it is worth visiting their site from time to time. They assigned a senior editor to study the future of papers. An informative update, with a link to her 47-page report, can be found here. The Spokane paper's current inventory of blogs - and of course, the Internet is only part of the print newspaper story - is available at this link.
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Most of us assumed the Seattle papers would go the way of The Oregonian or The Los Angeles Times: one gigantic mega-paper trying to be all things. Such papers can often do a mega-story that covers one issue really well; but the casualty is that local stories suffer.
It's clear from the settlement that the Seattle publishers realize the days of new mega-papers are gone; the Internet has forced papers to think locally and appreciate local community stories again. The News Tribune, for example, has created a 'neighborhoods' blog.
One funny aspect surfaces in today's Times. The reason I share this link is that many of you will remember that The Lakewood Journal was a tabloid-shaped paper. We occasionally got kidded about this, since much of the trash out there masquerading as papers, such as the National Enquirer, is in tabloid format. I will never forget a News Tribune solicitation to advertisers that took a swipe at our paper by noting their broadsheet format was "more credible."
So it's a chuckle that apparently the Seattle P-I is at least thinking of going to a tabloid format.
There have been a number of stories published about the Seattle arrangement, and none of them reflect a sunny future for papers. Check out this article from The Times just after the settlement.
It's no surprise that you are seeing online papers like The Suburban Times arise. As another example of the genre, when you have a second, visit this Seattle version of an online newspaper.
Final note: All of the Washington papers are taking various stabs are trying to make sense of the new order. Perhaps the most publicly thoughtful is the Spokesman-Review of Spokane. If you are interested in the future of papers, it is worth visiting their site from time to time. They assigned a senior editor to study the future of papers. An informative update, with a link to her 47-page report, can be found here. The Spokane paper's current inventory of blogs - and of course, the Internet is only part of the print newspaper story - is available at this link.
