More fun with the Gainesville Register

 First, it raised its print prices again, to $1.25 Tuesday and $1.75 Friday. Seriously, is anybody paying that? And, did your subscription prices go up with that?

Second, its editor is trying to get started, not an editorial board in the normal sense, but a community feedback board. It would probably start with "more local news." Of course, when you're not at all local meetings, and the Weekly News of Cooke County runs all the courthouse stuff (divorces, criminal pleas, police report, etc.) and you don't, you're sledding uphill, and the Register has been, as far as I can tell, since I started as ME at a pair of area weeklies more than three years ago.

But, that said, second part two? You've got both an editor and a staff writer, and you can't do that? And, you need the public to tell you more of what that "more" should be?

Part three. The new staff writer is a 2020 non-journalism college graduate. And, hometown person. Nothing wrong with either. 

But? Her actual degree? Education, with a teaching certificate. So, she either discovered that, mid-COVID, she didn't want to teach in today's education system, or, for whatever reason, she couldn't land a position. She was a church office manager before that. Again, nothing wrong with that. Before I landed on newspapers as the only reasonably available professional job in a place smaller than Gainesville, I did stuff that didn't pay well and was lower on the socioeconomic job scale than that. But, college was a lot less expensive decades ago.

Part the fourth, back to part 1. Your paper would be 8 pages on Tuesday, maybe 10 on Friday, without all the syndicated filler that your dumb-ass bosses at CNHI are probably still running in all your papers, even though they all stopped being daily in print long ago. So, you're charging $1.25 for an eight-page paper and $1.75 for a 10-pager? The Weekly News, as a semi-shopper, remains free. Among paid papers in this area, Wise County and Bowie are still a flat buck an issue with half again as many pages as you actually have, not what you nominally have.

If the Weekly News scraped up the money to hire your sports editor, or even a half-time sports guy, school year only, you'd be dead.

Or, if somebody started running more legals in another newspaper of general circulation ... that's all that props up the Register today.

Newspapers of NW Ohio raise my eyebrows

On LinkedIn, I saw an ad for a newspaper editorial position. ME at a 6-day daily.

It, the Daily Standard, claims to cover three counties in northwest Ohio.

Problem?

Aside from its home county, the smaller of the other two counties has an online-only newspaper whose website is better than this newspapers.

And, the bigger of the other two counties? About 10 percent larger, it has its own daily paper. And, to make it more fun, that paper, in Auglaize County, claims to cover the Mercer County of the Daily Standard. The cities are the fun-to-say Wapakoneta, in Auglaize, and Celina, in Mercer. St. Mary's, on a lake of the same name, is just east of Mercer County into Auglaize. The Daily Standard claims to cover it. Wapakoneta has a separate paper for that city.

Second? Color me skeptical that a paper in a county of less than 50K, less than 45K in fact, has 10K subscribers. (Well, the website said 10K copies.)

Third, color me skeptical that in today's newspaper world, that it's 6 days in print, rather than 6 days of e-edition. (The Ohio Newspaper Association doesn't list subscriptions for any members.)

Plus, there's a group of weeklies by a company called DNI floating around bits of NW Ohio surrounding this paper, too.

Surely, none of the three (or more) papers in the area is doing THAT well. The Daily Standard has a rate card that sounds on the highish side for a place that has a cost of living the same as most of rural Texas. They do offer not only frequency rates but a sliding scale on larger sized ads, tis true. That itself is interesting; it's generally an industry no-no to publicly post your rate card. Even more so in a still theoretically competitive area. They are cheap on class frequency rates compared to Wapakoneta.

Anyway, no, I'd be skeptical of them.