Sunday, February 01, 2009

Bad, bad Lee is down

The news just keeps getting worse for Lee Enterprises.

UPDATE: The Missoulian says "Pish!". And Intelligent Discontent replies, "Posh!"

3 comments:

Chuck Rightmire said...

David: One reason for the decline in newspapers, I feel, is that newspapers forget their big advantage over television is that they can cover more local news in their pages. The Gazoo seems to have forgotten that. They try to compete with multi-day enterprise stories, often on topics that others covered months earlier except for the local angle or they repeat information from day one to day two. And I've read several local items on blogs that didn't seem to rate their own stories in the news columns: the fellow who patrols the parking garage for instance.

Anonymous said...

I think the paper should feature more antediluvian musings.

Anonymous said...

Most newspaper have 90% ads, 10% news -- and in some, the ratio is even worse than that. I take the Arizona Republic every day (here in the Phoenix metro area, we have no choice since the East Valley Trib became a 4-day-a-week tabloid with a similar ad-to-news ratio; but at least it's free, and you can download a PDF to read offline), and take the paper apart. Oftentimes a 20-page front section winds up being a 14-pager (with three sheets being back-to-back full page ads for department stores and/or auctions for foreclosed homes). And a typical inside page consists of 1 or 2 columns (out of 5) of a news story with the rest of the page being ads.

After throwing out ad pages and inserts, a typical Sunday paper sees between a third and a half of the paper going into the recycle can, unread.

Personally, I'd like to see the paper feature The Best of City Lights (column or blog), featuring Ed Kemmick, Journalist. ;-)