You’ll be sorry when the local newspaper dies

This story is happening everywhere, but, who will be left to tell you, and why you should care… a lot.

First, the email came to tell us that the Dayton Daily News would no longer print a Saturday edition, and that subscribers should “read it online.” Bam, just like that, you just lost a seventh of your subscription.

Then, came the email announcing more changes:

Dear David:

Thank you for being a loyal subscriber to the Dayton Daily News. We know you value the important local stories our staff shares with you every day, so we wanted to let you know of some upcoming changes.

Beginning this Friday, the GO! section, filled with Things to Do ^[1] can be found inside of the Life section.

With its new home inside of the Life section, GO! continues to feature the latest lineup of local activities, festivals, live music and more in our region. The new placement allows for even more up-to-date features on area activities written by our staff and highlighted by local advertisers. Don’t miss the new Dining Out ^[2] column with a closer look at the local dining scene—new restaurants, new tasting menus, seasonal offerings and more.

Starting Sunday, July 16, the lineup of the Sunday paper will shift to include local news reported by our staff, obituaries and Ideas & Voices inside the A section; Local Business news and national and world news will be in the B section.

Sunday Life & Arts will now include a newly expanded HomesPlus section ^[3]. In addition to the local real estate information you rely on every week, HomesPlus will now include DIY features with local homeowners and experts, local home design news, and an inside look at how your neighbors are updating, renovating and restoring their homes.

We can’t wait to show you what’s in store. Find the latest news online below.

• Go! Things to do guide: Our guide to upcoming local fairs ^[4]
• HomesPlus ^[5]
• Dining out ^[6]
• Local Business ^[7]

Email sent to subscribers on July 13, 2023: “A new look on Friday and Sunday”

And just like that, more of the paper disappearing. What it really means, is that just the A+B sections are now printed on Saturday night- the rest, was printed a week in advance or more. (correction- from DDN folks- “the entire paper is printed on Saturday night. All of it. We don’t print any advance sections, and don’t need to deliver them ahead of time on Saturday night to our distributors. Same on Friday. Instead of preprinting Go!, we are printing the section live on Thursday night with the rest of the paper.

The reconfigured space added room for more locally-produced content and gave advertisers an additional 24-72 hours to decide whether they want to run in Go! or on Sunday.

This decision helped us gain efficiencies in production and distribution, made it easier to sell the time-sensitive advertising that powers Friday and Sunday and added content that our readers can’t get anywhere else. We moved things around, but the decision to move the deadlines was an easy one.”

As it is, the news is getting staler by the day. Today, Saturday, Elieen McCrory had the story “District may end double teacher model ^[8]” about a school board meeting that happened on Tuesday. Readers of this blog, read it Tuesday night ^[9]. But, let’s take it a step further, the Dayton Daily news headline is wrong, as is the story.

What actually happened is Dayton Public Schools ended the double teacher model, and it wasn’t the school board doing it, it was the new interim superintendent, David Lawrence, with the support of the people actually in the trenches. That a few school board members want to “discuss it” is irrelevant, that former Superintendent Lolli was praised for it, before any data supported her “double teacher model” is where a real journalist would dig in and tell the real story. That sordid story is right there and easy to find, if you even had a clue where to look, or who to talk to, or understood how education charlatans are everywhere. (If you need a prime example, go listen to the “Sold a story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong” podcast ^[10]. After listening to about half of it- I shared it with Dr. Lawrence, who thought it was amazing- it’s an example of the true value of journalism). I’ll have the rest of this story tomorrow for you, but for now, let’s continue with the failings of the Dayton Daily- and why, despite how bad it’s become, you’ll still miss it.

Back in 2004, as the owner of an ad agency ^[11], became convinced that Open Source Content Management systems were the future of the web. The top 3 contenders were Drupal, Joomla and WordPress and I had one of my team, who’d been coding our sites and building things in Flash, evaluate them. He came back to me and thought that WordPress was the one with the most potential, and we started moving our own website and clients sites to WordPress and I began teaching the “Websitetology ^[12] Seminar.” I also began publishing this blog to practice what I preached to my clients and to as the saying goes in the pet food industry- “eat your own dog food.” All these years and 3,189 posts later, I’ve learned a lot about how the web really works.

Back around 2005 I tried to talk to the Dayton Daily News about how to move their product online, and the person I was directed toward was Ray Marcano who is now their semi-retired Sunday editorial writer. Ray and I clashed from the git-go and Mr. Know-it-all proceeded to lead them down the path of their own destruction, investing in proprietary “industry-leading” software solutions.

The NY Times on the other hand, not only chose WordPress, but invested millions in the open source development team at Automattic ^[13] and built a platform that works beautifully for news, but never has perfected the advertising revenue enhancement side.

This is the fundamental reason newspapers are failing across the country and no one is really ready to talk about it. In the journalistic purists view- there has to be an absolute wall between the journalism side and the business side, for journalistic integrity to exist. And while that may be true when it comes to the actual content generation, the advertising support of that journalistic mission is absolutely necessary- it’s just that no one in the journalism field dropped out of Harvard and built a social media platform and figured out how to monetize dreck.

Newspapers should be making a fortune in ad revenue, but instead, they are shrinking and have lost their way. In desperation, reporters are now rewarded for clickthroughs and click bait instead of real reporting and serving their true value to the communities they now fail to serve.

For all the complaints that “people don’t read newspapers” anymore, I will tell you that people are consuming more content than ever. Notice, they are glued to their phones? While people may not watch the evening news like they used to, they are consuming video and podcasts and rich media (the internet) like never before. What people want is great content, and they really don’t care about the curation or even the credibility as much as they used to. This is because no one spent time teaching the masses about to value the vetting process that journalism used to lay claim to- remember, “All the news that’s fit to print” which has been on the masthead of the NY Times since 1897 ^[14].

Now, the masses believe there is such a thing as “Fake news” and the “Liberal Media” as much as they believe that there will be a second coming and that Taylor Swift may be Jesus.

Newsflash, it’s not Artificial Intelligence (AI) that we should be fearing, it’s the algorithms of the social feeds that have been feeding us a never ending “curation” of “what we want” (ie what keeps us engaged) on their platforms. The goal of Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok and any of the other platforms is to keep you there for as long as possible.

Newspapers on the other hand, continue to misunderstand their place in this ecosystem. Despite the social platforms reposting and profiting from the newspapers content, the papers have failed to understand where their value is, and how to harvest it.

Here’s the first clue, thanks to Nicholas Negroponte and his seminal book, “Being digital” ^[15] “Bits not atoms.”

1272 words and seven minutes into this story, and I’m going to share the holy grail and secret of saving newspapers and it’s not that complicated.

Content is king. People are looking for information constantly, and the newspapers are sitting on decades of relevant content to enable their readers to fully understand their community. Few have been smart enough to use their archives, or even the last 10 years content to their full advantage. Every story, has a back story, and their value- and ability to hold their audiences attention (and serve up more ads) is where they should be even more valuable to their readers than ever before. The connection of stories, via hyperlinks, or suggested stories is their secret sauce to enhanced engagement.

Community is more important than clicks. Very few newspapers understand this concept- that sometimes your readers actually know more about what’s going on in their community than you ever will. As journalism has lost it’s glamour (remember, Superman was a mild mannered reporter in real life, Spiderman worked at a newspaper as a photographer, and J. Jonah Jamieson as his boss was right there from the start) the newsroom also lost a lot of it’s institutional knowledge that used to be the key to reporting before we started letting reporters make stories out of facebook posts (why I never could stand Amelia Robinson’s drivel in the Dayton Daily).

Here’s the beauty of the web over the print edition- it’s actually 2-way instead of 1-way. In the early days of Content Management systems it was called the “read/write” web, establishing that the reader could add to a story. Look at Wikipedia as the worlds largest news gathering operation and realize, every single newspaper could create a resource of that magnitude if they let their readers in.

But, curation of comments is beneath most journalists, who still believe they are a superior class of people (See Ray Marcano above) to mere commoners like me who write for free. And the sad thing is, if they don’t wake up, they’ll be doing the same thing.

Every comment, every response, is an opportunity to suck readers back to the conversation/story. Facebook figured this out long ago, and yet the newspapers haven’t. They sort of farmed this out thinking they were saving money on not having to moderate comments- when in fact, comments are their lifeblood.

While Dayton used to be one of the rare markets where the same company owned the number one radio station, the number one tv station and the newspaper, they still couldn’t understand that their consumers didn’t need to be divided by format- one website, one community, was the holy grail. People like rich media- with sound, video, pictures, and a story, and not limited by the confines of the printed page. The true beauty of the internet is that it isn’t broadcasting- it’s actually one-to-one, and the more you know about that connection- the more valuable it becomes. By what people read, where they read it, when they read it, and how they interact with the content is the key to hyper targeting ads. Every other major media platform has figured out I like hockey, photography and video gear, funk music, great advertising, electric cars, swimming, progressive politics and power tools, all but the local newspaper.

Right now, the only ad revenue keeping newspapers afloat is the legal notices, public bids, sheriffs sales and obituaries where they charge by the line. Display ads are almost a thing of the past except for the charity of local large institutions. Even politicians rarely buy ads in the local newspapers anymore because the audited readership is so low, even though the percentage of actual voters amongst subscribers is high.

The funny thing is, it’s no longer necessary to sell your space on your website yourself anymore, their are the real time auction platforms for programmatic ads ^[16] that would absolutely love to place highly relevant ads to the newspapers readers, but it’s as if the newspaper industry doesn’t care.

When it comes to measuring metrics, newspapers are lost. “If it bleeds it leads” isn’t really their forte anymore, nor should it ever have been, unless the deaths had implications beyond those directly involved. And restaurant openings and closings doesn’t really create a connection a review does, or better yet, the true story behind what makes someone want to go into that crazy business. If you need to understand the value of journalism read a story by Tom Archdeacon that takes you places you, the sports fan, can’t go anywhere else to find out- vs the box scores and game recap. Real journalism- real stories, serve as emotional touchstones, the police blotter doesn’t.

Of course, there is more to this story, and the true secret sauce is how to get the community creating content that’s valuable, the way Facebook and Youtube have. For that, journalists will need to learn new ways of collecting and curating community content. It’s not just good enough to have letters to the editor or a “community advisory board” but to have eyes and ears throughout the community working on telling the stories that matter.

And, now, those stories matter more than ever. Understanding the difference between un-verified claims on TikTok of weight loss supplements, vs the real cost of being overweight on the cost of health care in this country. What taking home classified documents means when it’s a defense contractor vs the former President of the United States. How cost overruns for the F35 and mission creep have delivered one of the most expensive boondoggles on the planet- especially since manned aircraft should have been obsolete soon after the first V-1 and V-2’s hit London. Or how a local school board asks stupid questions and gets away with it for decades causing a once mighty school district to shrink from 65,000 to 12,000 students. Or how a city commissioner became a snitch, and was allowed to run for re-election, or….

Because, there are always nuances and more stories behind a story, no matter how simple a story may be. Real journalists get to the bottom of things.

And if you want to see the value of news in today’s connected society by a newspaper that understands things better than most- watch an award winning ad explaining the new ecosystem and realize, we do need the local newspaper now, more than ever.