Late Night
Oct 24th, 2005 at 11:28 pm by Susie
And the rain, which has been pouring down all day, is now hitting even harder. The rhythm of the falling rain against the air conditioner speeds up with the wind, falls back for a bit and picks up again. Cold and dreary…
Lots of changes in work, it’s extraordinarily stressful these days. Can’t talk about it but there’s a lot going on. It’ll either be very, very good - or not. We’ll see.
And in a not-unrelated matter: As soon as I can figure out how to install it, there will be a Paypal button that will permit you to sign up for a monthly donation to Suburban Guerrilla. Please consider doing so.
In the meantime, the Philadelphia Inquirer has invited a small group of bloggers to meet with staff this week and answer questions about how to attract more readers. I have my own ideas; what would you tell them if you were there instead?
The Inquirer? I haven’t read the Inquirer regularly since Steve Lopez was a columnist and the whole mess with Joseph Sobran.
They don’t cover local news well– the B section is usually 6 pages long, and is filled with nothing but bodies found in dumpsters and which politician got caught with his hand in the till. Reading the Inquirer for six weeks, I’m not sure I’d be able to name every member of the Philadelphia City Council, or even half of the local state reps– if it isn’t Street, or one of the Colorful Local People like Fumo, Kenney, or Mariano, they simply don’t give a shit, which makes the endemic corruption and stunning incompetence of city government worse, because it’s never being shown.
Their op-ed pages suck eggs. Worse than any other paper I can think of. I mean, I like Acel Moore, and I like some of the other local regulars, but could they maybe run someone national who’s somewhere to the left of Ronald Reagan? Or who expresses an opinion that you can’t find by flipping on CNN or Fox News?
Honestly, and it pains me to say this, because it’s Not Well Written, but the Daily News is an infinitely superior paper. They cover local issues surprisingly well (and have been running *fantastic* articles on local real estate tax policy, strangely enough), they don’t insult their readers’ intelligence in the editorial pages, and they are willing to run a surprising diversity of opinions in the op-eds. And their sports section rocks.
I think the Inquirer needs to focus more on local issues– and by local issues, I don’t mean housing prices in Pottstown. I’d like to see some actual investigative reporting, of the sort that the paper made its name with 20 years ago (Bartlett/Steele), and I’d like to see them genuinely attempt to open a debate with their readers on the future of the city and life therein.
They could try telling the truth. You know, like when a pResident says someone has WMD and you know they don’t, call him a liar. That would be a novel approach, and I would actually buy a paper that would tell me the truth.
check out this PCMag editorial:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1860820,00.asp
it’s not really proposing answers, but it sure describes the situation in an interesting way
They could try payola…
Where to start. The paper has been dumbed down tremendously. The editorial page is a sad joke. It appears that they have one only because you can’t be a real paper without something that looks like an editorial page. The he said she said nature of the section reads more like a college paper than what used to be a major national newspaper.
What is obvious is that they just don’t spend money on the paper anymore and the whole product from content to form has been cheapened. To many wire service stories, to little meat. It’s just not important to read the Inquirer anymore. There are no must read columnists (sports and local guys included),no investigative stuff, no meat.
The powers that be are wasting their time. They remind me of GM complaining that they are losing money because of rising health care and pension costs rather than the fact they have a lousy product no one is interested in buying anymore. If they produced something people wanted (ie spent money on quality) readership would increase.
How about a blog written by a person who writes clearly, with humor and good grammar, has an attractive personality and a good heart and who takes the time to search widely for news, information and interpretation and gather it together in an efficient and informative package.
I think that describes some blog I read, but the name escapes me at the moment …
#6 has preempted what I was going to say, but I’ll say it anyway –
Izzy to Inky:
Hire Susie!
I stopped reading the Inky five years ago, w/no apparent deficits. It really truly sucks anymore.
Rx for the Inky? simple: 1) hire passionate, intelligent, talented writers (such as susie madrak!), 2) tell the truth to power and 3) stop sucking up to suburban focus groups.
Or, get rid of the Inky altogether and pump more $ into the Daily News, which has been way way better than the Inky since at least the mid 90s.
In any event, no paper newspaper will be competitive with the Net for much longer; tell them to get their online act together SOON or they’re totally fucked. (the NYT, IMHO, just took a giant step backward w/”Times
Select.”)
They might try covering news from the entire metropolitan area, for a start.
I take the Inquirer (home delivery) because, compared to the local Wilmington paper, it’s a combination of Shakespeare and the Bible, but their coverage of Delaware news is almost non-existent, even though Wilmington is closer to Philadelphia than is New Hope, Pa.
Heck, when there were the floods a couple of years ago, the area map of flooded areas showed just a big empty spot where Delaware used to be and there TV section does not cross-reference Delaware cable channel numbers.
I’ve also noticed that the Inqlings gossip column is getting longer and longer, eating up more and more space. The Inky seems to be slowly turning into People Mag.
I’m a white gentile living in the suburbs and stopped my subscription to the Inquirer about 6 years ago; and except for local theater and music haven’t missed it.
Your problem is the same problem the major political parties are having - it’s related to the hopelessly disjointed diversity that American society has become. There is no American audience you can appeal to. Your core audience for the past decade has been blacks, Jews, and gays inside the city limits. If you try to open up to the people of the suburbs you will alienate your core constituency.
I don’t know what to suggest to solve your problem - but your core constituency owes you and it is up to them to support you.
Following on John Paul’s comment: For 15 years the Inquirer tried to, as its owners said, “conquer the suburbs” by heavy, heavy coverage of school boards, zoning boards, county commissioners…
It kept getting changed (cover this town one year, drop it the next) but the Inquirer has been in decline for a long, long time and clearly this didn’t turn anything around.
Not that readers of this site are necessarily a representative sample of Mr. and Mrs. America, but why didn’t this work? Is no one out there really interested in this local stuff that marketers said would work? Is it just that no one cares about local stuff except THEIR local stuff? In the end, is that stuff nice, but to sell the paper you need a Lopez?
Newspapers in general are in trouble. I was a newspaper reporter and editor for 20 years and now buy NO newspapers. I do subscribe to The Wall Street Journal online, and daily read The New York Times on my cell phone for God’s sake. But buying a broadsheet newspaper with stainy ink and not being able to instantaneously search for what I want? What is this — 1970? Better they should come up with a pay website. Why can I get The New York Times on my cell phone and not The Inquirer? I’d buy that for $3.95 a month.
I lived in “the Neighborhoods” in Philadelphia for a couple of decades, and the Inquirer was terrible. Its city reporters were all fresh-out-of-an-expensive-college newbies from out of town somewhere, who were forever reporting goings-on at a nonexistent intersection. Poor things, they had no idea which end was up and had to use the post office maps (which are reliably wrong) to tell them what neighborhood they were in. Plus its editorial and news stances were way to the right of what I now read locally in a quite Red part of the country. (I used to buy the Inquirer when Bartlett & Steele had a series going.) The Daily News was much better in many ways, but the Inquirer seemed to pull the chair out from under it whenever it got really rolling. For a while the Daily News had a fabulous business news section, for example, but it suddenly vanished.
I’m a Republican. Why would I ever read the Inquirer? All they do is mischaracterize me - to them I’m a war-monger, hate-monger, know-nothing who is “easily led.”
If you want to save the Inquirer you might whisper to them that it’s not a good idea to damn half of the American people. But then, as far as I’m concerned, it’s better just to let them die. The Spanish language media does a better job covering the news anyway.
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