Insider, a youth weekly that promises to bring readers "Rochester Remixed," debuted Friday. Editorial content includes weird news, breezily written mainstream news, snapshots of young people having fun, and two articles identified as "big stories." The free tabloid targets ages 25 to 34, according to the Gannett daily paper that publishes it. That age group is "wildly underserved," says Democrat and Chronicle Editor Mike Johansson. AAN member City Newspaper is published in Rochester.
Chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. tells a journalism school audience his company has no intention of publishing any youth or commuter papers like the Chicago Tribune's Red Eye. Sulzberger considers such papers "condescending" and degrading to the readership, Mark Fitzgerald reports in Editor & Publisher. Sulzberger says the Times doesn't want to "become less than we are to reach an audience whose needs we wouldn't do a good job of meeting."
The deal reminds Nashville Scene writer Matt Pulle of the arrangement Village Voice Media and New Times Media made in October 2002 to each close a paper that competed in a market dominated by the other. That plan threw the Justice Department into a snit. In a surprise move Monday, Gannett traded its only sizable Georgia paper, The Times in Gainesville, to Morris Multimedia in exchange for two small papers in Tennessee. Gannett also acquired two weeklies in Tennessee's Rutherford County. "While the swap of several small newspapers is hardly Comcast buying Disney, it marks the crowning achievement in Gannett's stranglehold of the Middle Tennessee area," Pulle writes.
The new entertainment-focused papers popping up in cities across the U.S. are "a melange of Entertainment Weekly and Reader's Digest," delivering simple content and big photos, says The Christian Science Monitor. But don't expect them to carry Savage Love. AAN Executive Director Richard Karpel says content shaped by focus groups "doesn't create a very compelling product." Readership Institute Director John Lavine argues that the hundreds of thousands of readers who pick up the tabloids prove there's a market.
Student government representatives are debating whether the Gannett Newspaper Readership Program is a threat to the student paper, the Iowa Daily State. Gannett is asking student government to approve distribution of four newspapers on campus—the Gannett-owned Des Moines Register and USA Today as well as the Chicago Tribune and New York Times. Funding would come from a student fee of about $5 per semester. Mark Witherspoon, the student paper's adviser, tells Daily reporter Luke Jennett that Gannett aims to increase circulation so it can boost advertising rates. "Gannett is asking students to pay $270,000 to hurt campus life—to injure themselves," Witherspoon says.
Daily papers have treated alternative newsweeklies with contempt, but it seems "that even that small share of local advertising revenue that is often a weekly paper's sole means of support is now coveted by the big boys," writes News Editor James Shannon in a MetroBEAT cover story. In February, Gannett's Greenville News will launch a youth-oriented weekly, The Link, to compete with the Greenville, S.C., alternative paper. Alt-weekly publishers in other cities tell Shannon how they dealt with the Gannett challenge. Boise Weekly Editor-in-Chief Bingo Barnes says he "spent the first month driving around and moving our racks and newsstands back into prime locations."
The New Haven Advocate becomes the latest AAN member to face a challenge from a daily with its eye on alternative weeklies' young readers. Play, which begins publishing March 3, will be "fun, informative and a little bit edgy," says its editor, Jonathan Cooper. The new tabloid, aimed at 18- to 34-year-olds, will also give New Haven advertisers "further access to a highly attractive audience," says Robert M. Jelenic, head of the Journal Register Company, which owns the Register and 22 other newspapers.
President Jay Smith and his chief financial officer, Charles "Buddy" Solomon, voted against censuring themselves for "violating business and journalism ethical standards" but were overruled by the other six members of Creative Loafing Inc.'s board of directors. The resolution's author, Sterling "Jim" Soderlind, accused the Cox executives of getting "a very good education in the alternative newspaper business while sitting on our board," and then using that knowledge to launch a competing free newspaper, Access Atlanta. John Sugg's Nov. 20 report on the meeting was followed by Smith's response the next week.
Chad Oliveiri, managing editor of the Rochester, N.Y., AAN member publication, talks to editors of other alternative newsweeklies to anticipate how a new Gannett weekly, tentatively named The InsideR, could affect his market. Free weeklies the media giant has already launched in Boise and Cincinnati compete with AAN papers for advertising and promotional opportunities. The silver lining is that Gannett is selling large mainstream advertisers on the concept of appearing in free weeklies, Cincinnati CityBeat Editor John Fox says.
Offering no substance and playing it safe aren't the way to win over the most educated generation of readers in the country, writes Scripps Howard News Service columnist Joe Donatelli. He was disappointed when he saw one of his columns reprinted in the Chicago Sun-Times' Red Streak at half its length and with all the humor expunged.
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