Not understanding the Gainesville Daily Register, part 1

I've been in my current spot in the newspaper world around five or six months. The Register is one of three dailies in the area, along with the Denton Wrecked-Chronic and the Sherman-Denison We Merged Something But Why, that are about equidistant.

When Sherman-Denison merged, and some newspapers were actually still expanding, I didn't get why it didn't make itself a seven-day daily and stake a territory as the only seven-day in the region and muscle out Denton and the Snooze. Of course, today, it's owned by Craphouse. Nuff ced.

The DRC, or DWC in my version, sold its soul to the Snooze, what, a full 20 years ago now? Man, hadn't realized it was that long ago. A few years ago, and probably a few years too late, it realized how badly it had sold its soul and bought it back, or partially so. Just 6K subscribers? WOWZA.

So, I've tackled those before, including, in the last year, the DWC's adhole woes. And the S-D Herald-Craphouse.

So, on to Gainesville.

And, as it turns out, this will be the first of two posts. Both will be about not getting it as an individual paper and not getting it on it being a CNHI outlet.

This goes to its deadlines on putting the paper to bed, apparent inflexibility with such, and the weirdness of such.

The Register publishes Tuesday-Saturday. (Well, they did before the coronavirus made them triweekly. Per Poynter, more than 30 papers across the country have folded due to COVID issues, and that beyond the regular hoofbeats, and almost all these papers are CNHI. It's like they realize that they have no more furloughing room.) They actually put the paper to bed Monday-Friday. Which is fine. Some five-day dailies are morning, and some are still "noonish" / afternoon ones.

But, they put it to bed EARLY.

I kind of wondered when I noticed that, with local basketball, a lot of stuff in print, like Tuesday night basketball games, didn't come out until Thursday.

But I had that confirmed on primary election day.

The lead story in the Wednesday paper? Early results, as in vote by mail and early voting in person.

Paper NOT held for election day results. Those went in Thursday. And, in the top two races in the county, district judge and sheriff, the leader in early voting lost the election. Therefore, you're confusing people by running only early returns, IMO.

"See the website," you may say. What percentage of their print subscribers are website subscribers as well? (The answer is all, but ... as usual with CNHI, a weird issue. Unlike many small papers, the Register — and presumably this is CNHI corporate — does NOT charge the same price for print + digital as for digital only. That said, it doesn't price the print + version that much more; it also does not offer a print-only. As I said, this is CNHI.)

Anyway, the final (with an oopsie of sorts) local returns were in by 10 p.m. IMO, you would run a brief version of that for the top races in print. OTOH, if you're a daily paper that no longer owns your own printing press (why not?) you maybe can't get a late print job done. Or, since I believe they "throw" their papers in-county as well as outside via USPS, they may have to be on a post office loading dock by a certain time.

So, why not go digital only?

Because the print + price isn't that much more, if you're older and want a newspaper in your hands.

The corporate semi-Solons in Alabama probably claim they're offering the best of both worlds.

I'd say no. Their subscription rates don't offer that big of a discount.

Plus, back to this and election news.

If I don't have a subscription and I've used up my five free online stories per month — or five per browser, and Internet tricks, etc. — "see Facebook," you may say!

Exactly. And on the election, if you're posting pictures of printouts of election returns from the county clerk's office, then, with stuff like that, I say ...

"Why subscribe"?

I'll have a part two in the future about some other issues.

Speaking of? Now that it's triweekly, today's issue, WITH the four pages of TV guide that they still continue to print on Thursdays and will be tackled more in the next post? It was a 10-pager WITH those teevee pages. Six without.

Bully for bulldog in Denton, I thought, but it wasn't; Denton Record Chronicle struggles, touts e-editions

Couple of Saturdays ago, when I was at a Wally in Denton, Texas, I saw a bulldog edition of the Denton Record Chronicle.

Page count was at least 28 pages, if I remember correctly. Adhole was 40 percent or better.

Then, I thought, I'd better check. Maybe it's cut to six days a week, or less.

And it had.

Twice a week in print right now.

Will it bounce back at some point?

It could, but ...

BUT ...

Not just for it, but all newspapers that have whacked print schedules?

The "bounceback" is going to have to be an active initiative. At some point, you're going to have to say, "We're just going to have to add back some of those print days."

Maybe you whack pages. Maybe you whack print run and only circulate locally (as in Denton County, no Cooke County, Wise County or elsewhere) on some of the re-adopted print days.

But, the longer you wait, the less likely you are to pick back up many of your print customers.

If I were the DRC?

The weekender, and a Wednesday with store flyers, would be the biggies.

Monday stays dead. Tuesday, a local edition. Friday a local edition and you push heavy for entertainment ads as movie theaters start reopening, etc.

That said, Poynter says e-editions, long an ugly duckling in the papers world, are the hot new thing, citing places like the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which is bigger than the DRC, and enabling it to do a statewide edition.

OTOH, the idea of making multiple e-editions per day based on things like breaking sports news? At big papers, especially, that can involve extra time. Plus, sports has never carried the freight in terms of display ads. So, IMO, editors and publishers still have a ways to go on e-edition smartness. And, as Poynter notes, it's still an open question as to how much of the freight e-edition ads can carry versus what they do in print, even if it's an e-edition only day.

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Compare this with the Casper Star-Tribune, which I'm guessing has about the same potential circ, that is population reach area, as the DRC, but surely a higher actual circ. It is just now making the decision to contract print days, but it's only dropping from seven to five. 

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Update: Sometime before spring 2022, the DRC went to just weekly in print.

Seventy years of newspaper bleed-out, documented

This excellent post, with LOTS of detailed graphics, shows how newspapers have been losing ad share for 70 years, though the fall off the cliff didn't happen until the Great Recession, per this chart:

Interesting trends to note. Per the author, there was a slow taper from 1950 to the early 1970s, then a stabilization, but the decline starts again and runs until the Great Recession, when it picks up steam.

Almost all of that goes to the boob tube. Radio and mags stay steady, basically, until that late 2000-oughts period.

Here's a chart showing why that chart above starts in 1950:

Circ per capita peaked in 1950 and it's been all downhill since then. And, the resume of the slide in the first graph? That happened shortly before total circ peaked. You'll note that its decline also accelerated with the ad decline.

This chart combines the two:

So how did papers hang on that long? Benedict Evans says boosting page count to boost total ad sell, which papers that remained standing as more and more big city papers were going to just one daily, or at least losing one of the three or more they might have in really big cities, in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The Net hit hard when it was able to deliver quality as well as quantity on online ads, and undercut newspapers as what he calls a "light industry."

Look through the whole thing.