A new business model
Every newspaper editor knows that readers prize those daily features that have nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with the joy of reading the paper. In our case, we're talking about the bridge column, the Jumble, the crossword puzzles, the comics, the horoscope, the cryptoquote and Sudoku. Miss one of these and the phone calls and e-mails outnumber by 10-fold the feedback on any piece of serious journalism.
This morning, we left out one of the two crossword puzzles we publish by mistake and by 9 a.m. we had gotten a dozen calls in the newsroom. Many more in customer service.
All of these features are commodity content, available everywhere. Following some of the logic we use on other things, we could drop them, save their cost and use the space for unique content. Yet, I am not considering it, and I doubt there are many newspaper editors who are. The savings would be minor and the costs high. All of the traditional daily features add to the value of the newspaper experience. The real question is whether we should add more. When I told one woman that we would run the omitted crossword along with the other two tomorrow, she said, "That's wonderful! That paper will be worth 75 cents."
Does lend some perspective.
Due to recent automated spamming attacks on our blogs, we are temporarily requiring commenters to authenticate themselves via TypeKey® before posting comments to any News & Record blog in order to prevent denials of service. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.