February 18, 2004
'Tribune' To Become Crappy City Tabloid?
As it turns out, tt's worse than perhaps we feared. Today's Willamette Week provides some more details on the changes at the Tribune:
Steve Clark, the penny-pinching head of Pamplin's chain of suburban weeklies, has been brought in to cut costs. Clark replaces sports columnist Dwight Jaynes as Tribune president, which gives him control of the paper's budget. Jaynes will retain the title of publisher but concentrate more on editing now, he says.
The layoffs gutted the paper's business section, while leaving intact the sports team. Editorially, the paper is expected to focus on shorter neighborhood and crime stories rather than the more ambitious photo and graphic-rich offerings of the past. Internally, that shift is viewed as the triumph of Jaynes and Editor Roger Anthony over Executive Editor Lora Cuykendall, who was the most senior of those let go and a champion of the longer, explanatory articles that the Trib once ran regularly.
For those of us who have long since grown tired of the banner headlines about local professional basketball, and who adored the fact that the paper often published lengthy articles on local economic development, culture, and the City's neighborhoods, these specifics are disheartening news.
If the WW sense of things is accurate, the Tribune will be reduced to sports and soundbites. Combined with Phil Stanford's column on the livestyles of the rich, famous, or inane, and these developments lead us to suggest that, in the name of truth-in-packaging, the publishers start printing the paper as a New York City-style tabloid and be done with it.
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Go read someone else's blog! on 19 Feb 2004
Lots of happenings here in Portland...on the West Coast...and in our nation in general. And here's a collection of insights well worth reading: worldwide pablo continues his excellent coverage of California's second 'gold rush' of sorts. b!X has the lo...
Comments (5)
Betsy on 19 Feb 2004
Well, if it's a tabloid like Newsday is a tabloid, I'll be happy - but I'm also not holding my breath.
It's a shame that they're amping up the sports coverage - but not surprising, unfortunately. The O's got the market covered here with bloated sports pages and horribly sporadic local business coverage - why do we need a duplicate?
And it looks like they're pulling Schulberg in to do business pieces - now that's reassuring, isn't it? (cough cough)
The One True b!X on 19 Feb 2004
I wish that ABC was still posting. He'd have something to say about all of this, I'm sure.
Worldwide Pablo on 19 Feb 2004
Yep, it's the LCD approach: When the going gets tough, appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator: sports and crime.
This mirrors the 24/7/365 reality of local television news, so maybe it shouldn't be such a big surprise that the cash-strapped Tribune would succumb to the same mentality. If you love sweeps month on local television, you'll love the new Tribune.
For his part, WWP is writing off Pamplin's media experiment. Too bad he burned up so many dollars only to abandon hope about five yards from the finish line...which demonstrates what a media amateur Pamplin really is.
But having said that, WWP deep down inside hope he is wrong about this...totally wrong. The idea of a one-newspaper town again makes WWP weak.
The One True b!X on 19 Feb 2004
Now, I understand that papers don't make their money on charging a price but on ad sales, but anyone have any idea why the Tribune never moved to charge?
Betsy on 20 Feb 2004
Because that effectively would lower their circulation base, which hugely impacts advertising sales. Better to say that you're distributing 100,000 copies twice weekly than to have, say, 10,000 paying subscribers, with the rest being given away for free.
And any revenues produced by selling the product,whether on newsstands or through delivery, typically pay for the cost of having the product delivered and not much more.