The Plain Dealer’s changes are “a failed attempt to bring traffic to it’s website”

That’s what one journalism student, Mitchell Blatt, says about the Plain Dealer’s most recent revamp:

…instead of improving newspapers so that more people will want to keep them, newspapers have been giving up. Newspapers have been cutting staff and shrinking papers across the country, and circulations have responding by falling faster. It’s a downward spiral not to be blamed on the internet but on poor business practices.

To give you an example, let me bring you to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The Plain Dealer has remained very much the same for the past few years up until this week. Last Sunday, the Plain Dealer announced changes to the paper. Those changes included cutting the Metro section to 6 pages (including obituaries) as well as cutting other sections.

…

Their journalists are still writing the same amount of content, but much of the paper points to the web to read it. The editorial/opinion page, for example, has been cut from two to one pages, thus depleting it from three editorials to one. However, it has a strip at the top of the page that says, “More Letters to the Editor … Read Online,” and “General Wesley Clark’s ego … Editorial Online.”

And guess what? That’s the exact same thing I wondered about as I read Tuesday and Wednesday’s PD. (So excited was I to read and review the revamp that I walked to the front of a 15 person-long line at a local coffee shop and paid with a $1.00 bill, because I didn’t have fifty cents, just so I wouldn’t have to wait in that line to head back home with the paper - then two - in tow.)

Everywhere it tells you to check features and follow-up on the web. But the thing is, intuitively, that the people left buying and reading a print newspaper are not only not early adopters, but might very well be the Full Service remnants of a bygone or soon to be bygone era. Which is to say - those folks still buying the print PD are probably the least likely folks to go looking online.

Can they be convinced, persuaded and otherwise enticed to go online? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know what the research says about that.

But let me put it this way: Tuesday and Wednesday’s newspapers had almost nothing in them, as far as news goes, that I didn’t already know. Not because I’m awesome, but because I receive updates from the PD and cleveland.com and OPENERS all day long, and I check my RSS of the PD news, all day long.

So all that content that got pumped out into the web on Monday? There it was in the paper on Tuesday.

I’m not an industry person - I really don’t know what the answer is. But to try and convert print readers to online consumers, at this stage of the game, doesn’t seem like it’s going to satisfy too many of the customers who’ve stuck by the print version.

I’d like to see Dick Feagler write about this - but I didn’t notice that his column is still somewhere in the PD - it must be that I missed that listing somewhere I’m sure.

Sphere: Related Content

By Jill Miller Zimon at 10:10 pm July 3rd, 2008 in Writing, Marketing, Business, Ohio, Culture, Cleveland+, Media, Tech

Comments

One Response to “The Plain Dealer’s changes are “a failed attempt to bring traffic to it’s website””

1 Jeff Hess on July 4th, 2008 7:40 am

Shalom Jill,

Industries don’t die over night. American steel manufacturers knew they were toast in the ’50s. American car manufacturers knew they were doomed in the ’60s and dead-tree media could see the end in the ’70s.

But just as Americans are in denial about the end of oil — we can drill our way out of $5/gallon gasoline — the leadership and owners of our Rococo Media believe that they will all be retired before the collapse comes.

B’shalom,

Jeff

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