Speaking of the Post

This month's American Journalism Review has a feature article on the Washington Post entitled "Reversing the Slide," which is summarized as "Jolted by sharp circulation losses, the Washington Post is striving to turn the situation around. The paper has convened focus groups, launched modest front-page zoning and added larger, more stylish key boxes. The top editor is calling for shorter stories, more art and graphics, and a livelier page-one mix. What does it all mean for the character of one of the nation’s best papers?"

The answer seems to be shorter stories, a bit more local news, zoned stories on the front page.

From the article:

Eight or nine Washington, D.C.-area lawyers, government workers and other residents sat around a conference table in an office building. They were strangers, all younger than 45, all had moved to the region within the last five years. None subscribed to the Washington Post.

An affable session leader from Boston began by asking about their daily routines and news habits. About an hour and 15 minutes later, he opened a cabinet, removed a stack of Posts and dropped them on a conference table. "What if I told you that you could have a six-month subscription free?" he asked them.

"In one session after another, I don't think I saw one person who would take it," says a Post staffer who watched the focus groups with colleagues from behind a one-way glass. The participants picked up various sections--Style, Metro--and stared at them like they were "Egyptian hieroglyphics."

They knew about the Post, of course. How could they not? It's the region's dominant daily and one of the nation's best. They even liked the Post. But they read it online at work. Former subscribers complained unread papers piled up at their homes, making them feel guilty because they hadn't read them. The responses were not " 'No, I don't like the Post,'" the staffer says. They were " 'No, I don't want that hulking thing in my house.'"

Participants asked for more listings of homes sold in their counties and for more community coverage, including local crime reports--already offered in zoned weekly or twice-weekly sections called Extras. "That was the most maddening thing for us," says Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the Post's assistant managing editor for sports. "We'd be behind the glass, screaming, 'We do that already!'"

These attitudes, which emerged in six focus groups in September, offer some insight into the paper's troubling--and surprising--circulation slide. During the six-month period ending September 30, the Post's daily paid circulation dropped 2.9 percent from the previous year, to 699,929. Sunday circulation fell 1.8 percent, to 1,007,487. Over the past two years, sales slid 5.2 percent daily and 3.9 percent on Sunday."

There's a lot more in the story. Read it.
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Speaking of the Newseum, I remember still the report from the Freedom Forum, Changing Patterns: Latin America's Vital Media, which discussed how visual media is dominant in South America, and how the print media never really developed a strong foundation.

In the United States, we are shifting to a visual culture as well, with television and videogames in particular, plus the continued expansion of cable and now satellite television (DirectTV states that it shows over 50,000 sporting events each year), while people are working more and are time starved. At the same time Internet-based media is absorbing more of the market for people who do read.

With regard to the Post, they really do have a lot of great stories. Whether or not people read them and act upon their reporting is something else entirely. I really feel like the Metro section has been covering more issues of substance, not merely the "bad things" (murders, child abandonments, accidents, etc.)--for a long time I thought the section should be retitled "Bad Things." But while not as pointed as the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the shenanigans for a new baseball stadium in Richmond, the Post has been doing a lot of stories on the business of baseball, not just the "joy of getting a team at bat."

I still would like to see:

1. More local columnists (sure I'd like to be one) but the Metro section should have a columnist every day;
2. More focused local commentary during the week (not just on weekends through the extra full page of longer letters), something more like the inside second page of the Philadelphia Inquirer local news section, which has one longer commentary piece, as well as zoned letters to the editor;
3. Sections like the "Getting to Know Your Neighbors" special reports from the Philadelphia Inquirer;
4. Keeping the "Extra" section backfiles accessible for more than two weeks, in a more organized and easy to use fashion.
5. A campaign comparable to Boston Unbound or Rethinking Philadelphia (you'll have to register, probably, to access this section of the Philadelphia Daily News).
6. More special features when new things happen (i.e., yesterday's Chicago Tribune has a special pullout section inside the Tempo section on the opening of the new Abraham Lincoln museum; the online version also has a multimedia feature).

Among other things.