Wake Up, Snooze-Papers!

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Wake Up, Snooze-Papers!
The hero of the day is a newspaper editor who says that most of our local rags lack the vision and guts to keep themselves relevant to readers. Click over the the CJR Daily version of the Columbia Journalism Review for the interview with Scott Goldman, assistant managing editor of visuals at the Indianapolis Star.

He is also president of the Society for News Design. Based in Syracuse, SND gives out annual awards for newspaper and magazine design. They stress integrating content and design. Images of the best newspapers are here. A searchable database is here; note that the most recent winner images won't be up for a month.

Goldman seems to have little patience with the chant that newspapers are victims. That is, they are in hard times because folk get their news from TV and the Net, and the just don't read much. Balderdash, he might have said. Instead, he puts it:

Most American papers are cutting at all costs and then sitting back and wondering why advertisers and the readers aren't coming. There is not yet even one leading newspaper chain willing to say that if we put our resources into building a better newspaper, making something that you can't miss, that is irreplaceable every day, then the readers will come and the advertisers will come. There's no doubt though that in these economic times, it takes guts and it takes someone really stepping forward to be a leader. Unfortunately, that's not happening in this country right now. You're seeing it abroad and even then, only in smaller papers. They truly know their audience. If you can identify that, you can really own something.

I just love it when putative experts concur with my opinions, here for example. The Globe is certainly not the only paper seemingly intent on putting itself in a death spiral. Sure, the board of the NYT and other publicly owned media groups want the highest profits they can get. They are capitalists and may have DUTY TO SHAREHOLDERS etched into their minds if not tattooed on their tushes.

More:
http://massmarrier.blogspot.com/2007/03/wake-up-snooze-papers.html