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Dec
20
A tipster told me the Cleveland Plain Dealer has gone all-local on its front page. Check out a week’s worth of front page layouts posted on Cleveland.com — and it is pretty much true. The only national display story in the last 10 days was the Mitchell report on steroids in baseball[sic]
Editor Susan Goldberg said in a phone interview that the new policy was not formally announced — the paper simply did it. National and international stories are regularly teased on a left-hand page one news rail, “but we wanted to get away from putting commodity news that everyone knows already out front.” The policy is a logical extension of the thought, “hardly an original,” Goldberg said, that people can get up-to-the-minute national and international news many places on the Internet so the core remaining news franchise for a regional paper is local.
I did notice the prominence of the voting story yesterday but didn’t notice anything else about the page in particular.
You?
By Jill Miller Zimon at 10:10 am December 20th, 2007 in Media, Ohio
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5 Responses to “Plain Dealer’s change to “local-local” front page noted”
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Hark! A beam of light shoots through the cloud! A blade of grass thrusts upwards from the concrete! Hallelujah! Susie sees the light! It’s local that will save us! All hail local news on the front page! Hosanna!
But, paraphrase some language from Dr. Strangelove (my all time fave flick) it loses its PR effect if you don’t tell anyone! WHY DIDN’T YOU ANNOUNCE IT TO THE WORLD!
Well would that have been admitting. . .an error?
Still: so shines a good deed in a weary world.
Ooo – so you like this move? I can’t believe it’s been more than a year since I gave up the print edition. I’ve thought several times that I’d start it up again, but then I see it at the coffee shop or where my kids get their haircut or at the Heinen’s cafe place where I eat lunch and I think…nah.
well, my theory is we are part of the nation and the world, but what do i know. I think a better practice is to replace non news with …. news! steroids were the only national story?
Yeah, I’m not sure about this local-local thing, I mean, sometimes the news isn’t about local or something outside local has to be shouted at us – I don’t know. There’s got to be a balance.
The bottom line for many newspapers is that people generally get national and world stories from TV and then the Internet – especially the targeted age group of younger readers. And newspapers can’t compete with either. So give the reader something they can’t get in depth anywhere else – local news.