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.

StartleGram, Snooze, continue to have COVID ad struggles

Last Thursday, I saw both papers on the racks in their Red River Valley exurban editions.

And, boy.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or StartleGram? First, it's been cut from the previous 20 pages down to 16. Hey, that made it 25 percent, or nearly so, on adhole.

As normal, I count obits as part of the adhole. Obits and extended classys with several public notices made up most of that. Display ads were less than three-quarters of a page, or less than 5 percentage points of that adhole.

Over to the Snooze. Normal, or post-COVID normal (can't remember where it was at in February) 30 pages on page count.

ELEVEN percent. The great majority was non-display. Now, it didn't get lucky, unlike the Cowtowners; no big raft of legal notices. But, that was "lucky" in Fort Worth. This is normal.

Still can't believe there are no talks, or rumors of talks, of a full or semi-full JOA.

The Associated Press in Black and White: Causing a controversy by trying to dodge one?

OK, so the AP says that the Stylebook  now says to do what many individual papers have done on a house style for years: Capitalize "Black."

That said, it said it would decide in about a month whether or not to capitalize "white."

CNN didn't wait. It said capitalize both. And I agree.

The issue is complicated by "Hispanic" being capitalized, but in the past, neither "black" nor "white."

As further illustration, last year's entire Stylebook listing on race-related language usage is here.

As for AP's current decision, if it's a legitimate idea to cogitate a month before a decision, do you really need a month? I think not.

So, is this a duck and cover instead? I think so.

The better-yet solution? Lowercase "hispanic." Oh, that neologism "Latinx"? Throw it away. It's a print media bit of virtue signalling. Does anybody really say aloud the word "Latinex"? Thought not. And, no, I'm not alone in saying that.

Update: Kwame Anthony Appiah brings his philosopher's hat to the fray to say "uppercase White." Why? It removes privilege from a White stance, among other things. I get exactly where he is coming from.

Update 2: AP has done just as I expected and is keeping "White" lowercase. Not me. Per CNN, and per Appiah, when I remember, both "Black" and "White" get uppercase. Poynter has more. Per the piece, the AP is engaging in cultural essentialism. The new African diaspora in the US has not necessarily had all of the same experiences. It's that fact, as well as the skin color of his mom, that led some Blacks to ask if Barack Obama was one of them. Within the New World, many Caribbean blacks who have emigrated to the US don't claim to have entirely common cultural experiences with Blacks born in the US. Ask Colin Powell and others.

VP for Standards John Daniszewski also claims "there is less support for capitalizing White." Really? Per the CNN link that said it would capitalize both? Per the feedback you've gotten over the past four weeks? "Less support" is purely relative, not absolute, in this case.

CJR follows AP, or rather preceded it, I think, on a house style. Whatever; it's wrong, too. And, as regular readers here know, it's not the first time I've found it wrong by any means. And, contra a claim by Dallas sports teevee talking head Dale Hansen, it, like most media (self included) doesn't like to admit its mistakes.

Anyway, on this and other blogs, and in all likelihood at any professional sites, this person will capitalize both.

TV, not just papers, is bleeding ad money

This excellent post, with LOTS of detailed graphics, backs up a blog post of mine from last year, when talking to a programmer at an entry-level broadcast network TV station. He said that, especially on news, TV advertising hadn't taken hits.

Wrong.

Now, to be sure, TV's degree of hit hasn't (yet) been as harsh as newspapers. But, in terms of percentage drop? The Net really accelerated about the time the Great Recession hit, and it hit TV as hard as it did radio.

Calling out the NYT on its Overton Window

So, the Old Gray Lady said goodbye to James Bennet as NYT op-ed head last week. He won't be missed. Will his temporary or permanent successor reign in Bret Stephens or Bari Weiss? Probably not. Move Teapot Tommy Friedman out to pasture? Unlikely.

That's the theme of Kenan Malik's commentary at The Guardian.

Shorter, and sharpened, Malik?

The New York Times has erected its own Overton Window for the past three years. He mentions Stephens; dunno why he passed by Weiss, unless ultra-Zionism isn't on his radar screen, or unless he felt  Stephens was good enough as representative of a class. (Mondoweiss notes that Israeli guest op-eds have had Tom Cotton angles toward Palestinians before, like Schmuel Rosner, one of four such in 2018. One of them was by Stephens.)

The column has other points, though. Yeah, Bennet resigned. Riffing on Malik, this isn't the first time he hadn't read a controversial column, though. So, did the NYT push? Shouldn't it require its editorial page editor to personally read all potential guest columns before they run?

That said, Malik only touches on the tip of the problem. The NYT has long had NOBODY representing blue-collar liberalism on its pages. It's NEVER had anybody representing left-liberalism or beyond.

So, not only has it moved its Overton Window rightward with Stephens and Weiss, it created its own Overton Window in the first place.

If people would stop subscribing to the damn thing, since subscriptions, and especially digital ones, are an ever-bigger part of its revenue, maybe it would listen up.

Not likely, but maybe.

A way for the feds to bail out local print media, no strings

Poynter has the simply brilliant details.

Have the feds spend some advertising dollars on local print media. Avoid Ad Council, avoid big TV stations, avoid social media.

Sure, there might be a bit more overhead.

But, as Steve Waldman notes, folks still trust their local paper more than social media. Or than national media.

And, right now, with COVID, such trustworthiness is needed.