The New Newspaper
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is experimenting with a front page without news - just highlights of the feature stories and photos inside.
The San Jose Mercury News has begun a weekly section written by readers.
The St. Petersburg Times recently turned a true story about a woman whose secretly gay husband died of AIDS into a 29-part serial complete with cliffhangers at the end of each episode.
These examples were cited by The New York Times in describing a recent effort by smallish newspapers to boost circulation. The idea is to establish closer ties with readers - and give them what they want.
It is necessary for newspapers to consider what readers want, of course. Without readership there would be no papers. But these innovations go too far. The trend is, not surprisingly, driven by marketing studies. It is the Dick Morris approach to journalism. Polls dictate policy.
At The Star we go to great lengths to give our readers a voice. We offer unlimited space on our letters pages and print every letter (within certain guidelines). We use guest reviewers frequently and solicit fiction and "Guestwords." But we can't help clinging to the notion, no matter how quaint it may become in this day of infotainment and advertorial, that a newspaper's primary mission is to deliver the news, whether serious, analytical, or light, written by reporters.
Nevertheless, we're ready for the possibility that the day may arrive when we've got to get with the program in order to survive. Here are some of the changes our preparedness committee has suggested:
No more hard news. If you want local news, go hang out at the Candy Kitchen. Better yet, read Page Six - no danger of getting snagged on boring stuff there!
No more bad news. Begone tax rates and lawsuits, obituaries and car crashes, Lyme disease and brown tide!
No more art, theater, music, and book reviews by critics in the field. From now on, you're the critic. Your kid's the critic. Your pet's the critic. Maybe we'll even put it on the front page if it looks favorably on one of our advertisers.
Yes, the front page. From now on it will be filled either with favorite landscape or beach volleyball photos, personal advertisements, or contributors' poetry. We'll take a poll. You decide which!
Remember "Recovering the Past"? Mothball time. When the time comes, The Star will debut a hip contest - "Unpuzzling the Present." Readers can decode the maze of relationships surrounding photos from the party circuit.
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