The Great TD Revamp: Much Ado
As I was leaving the office on Monday -- the front section of the revamped Times-Dispatch tucked under my arm -- I stopped to chat with a coworker, another former journalist gone awry.
"Whoa, old school. That sort of screams, 'I'm irrelevant!'" he said, nodding in the general direction of the paper. "I'd hate to see their demographics. Remember the Methodist church I was married in? There was us, a couple in their 50s and the rest of the congregation was well into their 70s."
Which brought a couple of obvious things to mind.
First, the fact that as a 40-year-old lover of newsprint, I am an anomaly among the Times-Dispatch's readers. An anomaly they wish they could replicate, but an odd bird, nonetheless. I'm the guy who goes out of his way to pick up the latest issue of Style or Skirt or RVAMagazine, even after reading them online. I enjoy sitting at a table in the morning with my laptop, a copy of the Times-Dispatch and a cup of coffee. It's quickly becoming apparent that I am, in fact, well into my 70s.
Translation: Most people don't start their day with a printed newspaper.
The other thing that struck me -- not for the first time -- is that the physical form of newspapers has been run over by technology. I think of the guy who used to deliver glass bottles of milk to our front stoop in the morning. (See? I really am well into my 70s.) One day he woke up and grocery stores were selling milk in plastic jugs -- with an eternity before it expired, at least two frickin' weeks. Or the poor chump who delivered coal in a horse-drawn cart to those houses in the Fan, and the way he snickered at the other chumps installing a gas pipeline down Grove Avenue. As if...
But there's the crux of the issue for newspaper publishers -- Is the delivery system as important as the content? Is the printed form of news a distinct product (design + format + content) or simply the packaging for the product (content alone)?
In the case of the milkman and the coal chump, they were simply delivery systems. Someone else produced and owned the content [milk], which essentially is where the profit lived. And how that content got delivered -- direct from the cow, through the grocery store, refrigerated or in pasteurized boxes on the grocer shelf, turned into ice cream or yogurt -- really didn't matter to the guy with the dairy farm.
So, if my curmudgeonly 70-year-old self is overly concerned with the look and feel of an archaic delivery system [the newsprint version of the Times-Dispatch], it's no wonder that my hep 24-year-old self [poor, tiny, repressed self] keeps checking out inRich.com in hopes that they've somehow learned to deliver a vast swath of content in a clean, easily-accessible, aesthetically snazzy way.
I'd be an ass if I didn't acknowledge that they are getting there. Slowly, yes, but they just exorcised Virginius Dabney from the publisher's office and Ross MacKenzie from the editorial conference room!
This week's change-up in the TD's printed content was two parts right direction, one part waste of time. And it simultaneously reminds me that it is possible to redesign yourself into obsolescence, and that I don't envy the job of the Times-Dispatch's staff as they try to tangle out whatever it is they do that will remain relevant 10 years from now.
No one asked me, but I'm sort of thinking the content will still matter -- if the content is well-written, timely, interesting and not available elsewhere.
Publisher Tom Silvestri certainly framed the challenge as he sees it in an open letter to readers last week:
Our business is going through a transformation in which general news and highly specialized information is available, often for free, on multiple platforms, such as online or on your cell phone. At the same time, we're feeling the effects of a stubborn economic downturn, fed by an apparently tapped-out middle class...
... The planned fewer pages can be traced, in part, to higher newsprint prices, which are projected to rise by more than 12 percent this year. The subscription-rate increase has its roots in higher gas prices and other rising manufacturing costs. Our retailers, on whom we rely for advertising dollars, are hoping for better days as well -- some, such as A&N and CompUSA, have gone out of business, taking with them ad dollars we no longer have.
Thank goodness for the thousands of valued readers who have subscribed to this newspaper for 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50-plus years. In our conversations last week, many of you acknowledged that your children, their friends or younger neighbors don't read a newspaper as their main source of news. This trend stings the newspaper side of the business.
It also worries us all on how informed this community really is or will be in the future. Feeding the broader information habit is one reason our newsroom has adopted a Web-first approach, so inRich.com is updated throughout the day with breaking news and updates. In the bigger picture, we see where this is going, and that's why Media General has been a multimedia leader.
The Times-Dispatch's livelihood is a balancing act: Publish the best regional newspaper possible given our resources. Expand online capabilities. Launch niche products aimed at satisfying a specific, narrower audience and winning smaller advertisers. Embrace emerging technologies. Do it faster.
All of which leads me to the restructuring and reformatting of the TD's content this week. It was a week of hits and misses:
- I read the A section of the Times-Dispatch for the first time in a decade on Monday, when international, national and local news all lived together for the first time in ages; there was no distinct Metro section. Tuesday through Saturday, no dice. I read the front page of the main section, tossed it into the recycling pile and moved on to the Metro section. Who needs Associated Press stories on the rest of the world when you have an RSS feed to 16 international news sources?
- Another win for Monday's paper -- the Getting Started box on page A1. It actually had interesting tidbits of information about the week ahead. Too bad it doesn't repeat daily.
- Marianne Matera wondered what "wraps" are. I'll just tell you that wraps are crap. All week, the paper was shrouded in fluff -- half-page and single-page wraps of comics and Dear Abby and puzzles. It may well be the most annoying way to package content that I've seen.
- Wednesday's Food section was more interesting than it has ever been. Ditto Thursday's revamped Home section.
- Moving the Weekend section to Friday makes it bit harder to actually plan, but I suspect the reality is that few people actually plan their lives with a newspaper these days. The broadsheet format is so much better than the old tabloid look.
By the end of the week, I realized that the "major change" touted by the Times-Dispatch was a fair bit of sound and fury. I was hoping for something more dramatic, more significant. Of course, the last dramatic change almost made me poke my eyes out.
Posted by:Jon | May 19, 2008 at 09:30