The print edition of today's Lincoln Journal Star sports section is a perfect illustration of the frustrations some of you have expressed lately about the LJS's lack of content. Page 3 is 50% advertisements. Page 4 is 100% advertisements. Page 5 is 100% advertisements. With 2.5 pages of ads in a six-page section, you're looking at 40% ads, 60% content. Of that 60%, most of page 2 and page 6 are raw data (various sports results and baseball stats, respectively). And about 1/3 of page 1 is taken up by a large photo and headline that several of you have railed against.
I'm still a subscriber and I don't plan to unsubscribe any time soon. But at 60/40, the ratio of content to ads is getting scarily close to the likes of Cosmo.
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It’s pretty expensive to run a newspaper, and advertising is the traditionally accepted means of covering most of that cost. The subscription rate doesn’t come close to covering it. Unfortunately, when the powers that be significantly shrink “news” space, while simultaneously filling most of the remaining space with fluff (can’t even bring myself to call it infotainment, much less news), it’s digging itself in deeper. Publishers don’t get it, but readers are smart enough to realize there ain’t no “there” there anymore, as Gertrude Stein would say.
Shrinking news space and laying off dedicated employees (as LJS also did this week ... including a 17th straggler who found out Friday when he returned from vacation) aren’t limited to Lincoln; those are national trends.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone realized they could still make a healthy profit from offering real, substantial news? Readers still want it, and its shrinking availability means a smart someone could corner the market. But since newspapers are no longer realizing 25-30% profit margins, their investors are giving up on them. Lee Enterprises (LJS parent) stock is 10 percent of what it was a couple of years ago. No money means cutbacks; cutbacks mean diminished “product” (they don’t even bother calling it news these days); diminished product means fewer consumers. And the downward spiral continues ...
I overheard a couple people at the Saltdogs game on Friday talking about how little Husker coverage they’re seeing in the paper this year. I stay as far away from LJS sports coverage as I can, so I’m not sure if that’s true or not. Hard to imagine the LJS straying away from the topic that keeps their paper in business.
I haven’t noticed it being a lot less or a lot more. However, by the time a lot of it is in print, I’ve read it on their blog.
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