From my years and years of living in or near the Dallas side of the Metroplex, I've seen the continued decline of the Dallas Morning News, and blogged about it repeatedly, in part because of the paper's pretentiousness, usually doubled down upon by the Belo corporation's own pretentiousness.
That said, over on the other side of the Metroplex, over in Cowtown, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram isn't totally hunky and dory either.
The StartleGram may not have the same individual, or corporate, pretentiousness as the Snooze. But, it's got problems.
I saw these problems when, for the first time in years, I looked through several issues at a fair-sized library when I got the chance.
Paid ad numbers by adhole percentage, in column inches, are no better than the Snooze's. And, that's with downsizing to a 46-inch web AND downsizing page counts — in some cases dramatically.
How dramatically? Or how drastically?
They run a 16-page paper on Mondays. That sounds like something for the Waco Tribune, or a few years ago, still for the Wichita Falls Times-Record-News. Yikes. (The Snooze, for comparison, runs 32 pages.)
AND, with that, and the smaller web, and, as I normally do, counting obits as paid ad inches, they STILL barely hit 25 percent on Mondays.
In addition, they've basically gutted the op-ed staff over there. NO local columns or editorials on that Monday paper. The dean of commentary of the StartleGram, Bud Kennedy, runs on a "Lifestyles" page and section the days he runs. (Bud may have been there in the past, to be honest.)
I used to think that, if a joint operating agreement was going to happen between the two papers, based on increased collaboration in the past decade, the StartleGram had the upper hand based on Snooze bleeding.
Now I'm not so sure.
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