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For events outside Colorado there are much better sources available than the Denver dailies could ever hope to match. Even USA Today is a lot better, and online sources are better still. I could easily imagine a bundled arrangement for outside-Colorado news, the way for example Parade magazine works, where a national publication is enclosed in the Denver paper, maybe even giving the subscriber a choice of national sources.
I do happen to subscribe to both the Rocky and Post, but only because my responsibilities require it. Having two newspapers in paper form that try to do exactly the same thing, seems pointless to me. While the market might be big enough to support two similar newspapers, it seems to be no longer big enough to support two *quality* newspapers. Cost-cutting pressures seem to be pushing the two dailies to deliver almost identical diluted content rather than pushing them to specialize, so we're getting less and less news.
Moving one to the afternoon might be a start, but I think it's probably not enough. I think they need to distinguish themselves even more if they are to deliver better quality and still stay in business.
Even at the state and local levels I think there might be room for newspapers to be content bundlers, to provide printing and delivery service (but not editorial control) to publications that otherwise might be online-only. The Post or Rocky would be improved dramatically, for example, if they contained a section provided by CoCo. We could get competing editorial viewpoints in this way.
It makes me wonder if the newsroom and editorial functions should be somehow separated completely from the JOA and allowed to organize themselves more like online businesses, that simply use the JOA as one of their distribution channels. The current newspaper business model seems to fighting a losing battle against obsolescence.
Currently, nearly all newspapers are for-profit businesses. Joe Mathewson, with a distinguished background in journalism, argues that perhaps now is the time to look at having non-profit companies take over some news organizations, and I'm all for it.
From Joe Mathewson:
"Let's dream for a moment about newspapering freed from the profit motive. Purists may argue that newspapers, like any other enterprise, should have to earn their way in the marketplace, and if they fail the market test, so be it.
But in fact newspapers, as important to the civic health of our society as public transportation, have a claim on public allegiance that goes beyond financial measure. Does anyone believe that our society is better, our civic virtue enhanced, by the failure of the Washington Star and the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Daily News and all the other fine dailies that have perished for purely financial reasons."
I'm a big fan of capitalism, but also realize when and where market forces do not always work hand-in-hand with the public good. When corporations own newspapers they can make demands for profitability that hurt the overall quality of the coverage (say, by laying off most of the newspaper staff). Some of the best newspapers in the country (think the New York Times) are family owned because they are dedicated to the mission of journalism as much as they are to the business of newspapers.
Regarding an afternoon daily. Look at the circulation numbers of the cities that have them....not good.
Bill, are you including in your pool of Internet sources solely US media or the foreign press too? Which sources do you think do a better job?
Lastly, I think there are also "news hole" issues with online media. However, it's not based on limited physical space on a printed page. There is a mistaken perception that online readers don't/won't read long form stories that consist of more than a few grafs and a blinky graphic.
What does that mean in terms of content -- hyperlocal news drilled down to the neighborhood level; investigative stories; magazine-styled writing; something else?
My experience has been that neither commerically or charitably-minded management are particularly adept at dynamic change or sound organizations.
Second is how well the article answers the questions I want to ask as I delve into the article. A lower-quality article leaves out important facts that a reasonable person would ask, or omits background necessary for understanding the article. The local papers maintained their quality in this regard for awhile even as the quantity declined, but lately it seems like I'm seeing a lot of stories with big holes, that look like they were written too quickly.
Then there's clarity of presentation, especially use of photos and graphics to explain the story.
There's also the matter of balance, which I think is where the editorial viewpoint of the newspaper most intrudes on objectivity. How you draw the line between what is a legitimate opposing viewpoint, and what is not. It might be legitimate to ask the Republican Party's perspective on a taxation issue, but not the flat earth society's position on the discovery of a new planet. Often there are more than 2 valid viewpoints.
I don't know enough about the cost structure of newspapers to know how far you can drill down into neighborhoods and specialized topics. The Denver papers are steadily reducing the amount of that kind of content, and I would certainly like to see it move back the other way. YouHub so far is a poor substitute but it may be more because of the awful technology they use for entering and organizing stories - it's often too painful, and a lot of important local news goes unreported because of the hit-or-miss news gathering. (You could call it a lack of standards for uniformity of coverage.)
Investigative stories are good when the reporter makes a clear effort to present a balanced complete story. That sure seems to have gone out the window in our dailies. Even though blogs do a good job on investigative stories, I treat them with a big (gigantic) grain of salt because of the (usually) clearly-stated bias, and lack of standards that make it hard to be sure you're getting the whole story.
Magazine-style writing I don't care about in a newspaper.
That's all I can think of for now, just a regular joe's assessment of his daily papers.
When I think of magazine-style writing, I unfortunately shorthanded that to mean a quality of writing and narrative style more frequently observed in The NewYorker or Atlantic Monthly.
I agree that the apparent slapdash work too often gracing the front pages of the local papers (dailies and weeklies) has so little context, background and logical flow that they are rendered unreadable.
As for ideological bias, I have less of a problem with it as long as it is clearly stated. The major foreign press can be fairly easily categorized and they provide a much superior product in global affairs coverage over US media.
So each time I see one of interest I make a point of hunting around in other blogs or the mainstream media to get the rest of the story. And this turns a few more articles into "so what"s. Finally you're left with a few that might be real stories. Most people wouldn't go to so much trouble to check out these stories. So they disperse their energy into a lot of dead ends and sound like crazy conspiracy theory people when they pass the stories along to others. I think it reduces our effectiveness and does a disservice to us as news consumers.
I would much rather see reporters make a sincere effort to balance their stories, so I can trust them enough that I don't have to check up on them every time. There are only so many hours in a day.
That's another issue though then what I'm getting at here (but a great topic for a future editorial in its own right).
Is it truly realistic to expect balance in journalistically-reported stories (not blogs) knowing that we are all humans with biases, personal experiences, and perspectives that color how we view the world?
Contrast that with the online reader's access -- generally for free -- to the output of every major global news service (AP, Reuters, New York Times); every major newspaper, foreign and domestic; major periodicals (weekly, monthly, etc.) that frequently make their content available to non-subscribers; and broadcast networks (although any more their online offerings either are of questionable credibility or are taken straight from the news wires). For readers who generally are news skimmers already (it's sort of a truism that most print newspaper readers never read every story, every day in the paper) it's a format tailor-made to kill the print product. Further, as more and more people have ready access to broadband Internet (largely through work, where the stats show a huge amount of non-work online activity takes place, probably due to the free, fast connection) there's even less reason to turn to the print newspaper.
(I totally understand the rest of your point though.)