by Glynn Wilson

Walking into the local Food World grocery store the other day to stock up on Yuengling for the week, I was a bit surprised to see a representative from the Birmingham News hawking newspapers just inside the door.

I guess the declining circulation trend is hitting home on the local level even though the News now has a monopoly on the local daily newspaper market since the Post Herald went out of business last year.

The guy was fairly knowledgeable about the circulation problem, saying the News has fallen to only a 10 percent penetration in the metropolitan area market.

News organizations of all stripes are trying to deal with this problem, and I’m always fascinated to see what the pencil pushers or “green eyeshades” - or should we call them “data crunchers” these days - come up with to try reversing the slide.

At Gannet, the corporate owner of USA Today and papers such as the Montgomery Advertiser, are engaging in a broad restructuring aimed at going after more local news using so-called “citizen journalists,” a euphemism for using unpaid members of the community to cover things the paper doesn’t want to pay to cover.

Gannett To Change Its Papers’ Approach

I could charge a lot of money as a consultant to show newspapers how to save themselves, but instead I will offer a bit of free advice.

Of course this is guaranteed to be totally ignored. But that’s fine.

Free Websites like this one will continue to encroach into their audience as they continue to live in denial about what people really want - a news organization that tells the truth and stands up for them, not one that kowtows to the corporate bastards and runs press releases as news.

As an example of where newspapers could improve their “products,” take a look at an item in today’s Birmingham News.

New AT&T plan links wireless, wired lines anywhere in nation

There was a time in the news business when no self-respecting reporter would take a byline on a story that is obviously a barely rewritten corporate press release. Not anymore.

Here’s a clue for local media management. Stop paying reporters a living wage to rewrite press releases and send them out of the office to do some actual reporting.

As I e-mailed the reporter in a message that will be totally ignored: “Thanks for the AT&T press release. Now where’s the reporting on BellSouth losing the war with the cable companies for high speed Internet access, the rip off nature of the AT&T-BellSouth merger - and illegal spying on Americans?”

As an experiment, follow these links and get a feel for what I see everyday in my news watching routine. If you take the Birmingham News print edition, notice who is writing all those stories that fill up the newspaper. Notice how few of the stories are actually generated locally, as opposed to AP wire stories, the Newhouse wire service, the Washington Post and New York Times.

Go to the Locust Fork News Alabama news page. Click on the Birmingham News Web site link, and ignore the flash wire stuff for a few minutes.

Check out the actual content produced by the newspaper’s paid reporters. What you will find is that there is very little actual news reporting going on. And, you should see immediately that you could live without most of the original reporting, unless you are obsessed with every little crime story and high school sports story.

We suspect as the corporate chain newspapers continue the acceleration of a trend that actually started back in the 1980s to produce more local news, all this talk about more local reporting means newspapers will use more free reporting from people in the community to the detriment of anything resembling investigative journalism.

And the fact is, that’s what people expect from their local newspaper, not more Bellsouth Press releases or coverage of local sports. By the time this trend runs its course, I fully expect newspapers to be filled with community-generated reports on the local church volleyball league playoffs.

Using that space to appeal to individual readers like that will do nothing except run off even more serious readers of newspapers, who more and more are going online to find authoritative voices on the big issues of the day.

Now, if newspapers would actually commit to doing more local investigative reporting, they might be taken seriously. Like the guy who e-mailed me last year wanting me to spend more time in Blount County investigating the “corrupt” sheriff who was running for reelection.

With limited time and resources, we tend to stay focused on the big national issues that affect the largest number of readers in their daily lives. What George Bush is doing in the Middle East is important to everybody - not just the few folks interested in the local volleyball scores.

With a full-time correspondent in outlying counties, papers such as the Birmingham News could potentially do more local reporting that matters to people. But don’t hold your breath. Watch for more free press releases that matter only to the smallest number of people - especially corporate advertisers. And watch for more and more community claptrap.

The editor of the News, who writes a completely forgettable column each Sunday that practically no one reads, recently wrote a column about the trends in circulation. In the end he concluded that perhaps what newspapers need is more “rowdiness.”

I e-mailed him and asked where the rowdiness was in his newspaper, but of course I got no response back.

That’s the other trend you will continue to hear about. News organizations claim they want to hear from you.

But give it a test run. Send an e-mail message to the address listed on their Web site and see if you get a response. I’ll bet you a Yuengling you won’t hear a word back.

Now, send an e-mail to me or post a comment on the Locust Fork Journal blog and see how fast you get a response.

fast2write@charter.net

Game. Set. Match.

Tags: Media Notes

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.