The newspaper industry got some good news and some bad news last week.
Advertisers spent some $773 million on newspaper websites during the third quarter of this year, up 21 percent from the same period a year ago. Newspapers are getting their piece of the online advertising pie.
At the same time, though, print advertising in newspapers dropped by 9 percent, to $10.1 billion. Total newspaper advertising -- online and in print -- was down more than 7 percent for the quarter.
Two newspapers are reacting in very different ways.
Gannett's USA Today, the nation's second biggest daily, announced it will cut almost 9 percent of its news staff. Does that mean the paper will rely more on wire and syndicated material, or will it do less investigative journalism? Will cutting back on news staff hurt the volume or quality of its content impact, and how will that, in turn, impact readership?
Time will tell.
Across the country, the San Jose Mercury News is trying a very different tactic in order to boost readership and attract more advertising. A lengthy story in The Washington Post describes what it calls "slicing and dicing" of a newspaper. The Mercury News is totally reorganizing its newsroom, shifting two-thirds of its reporting staff to the paper's online editions. Before the change takes place in February, roughly 10 percent of the paper's newsroom staff had been devoted to the web edition.
With the change in newsroom staff allocation, the Mercury News will also trim its print edition, using less newsprint. One possible scenario calls for the paper to have three sections --Live, Play and Innovate. Things like sports and TV and film would all be lumped together in Play. Business and technology would go in Innovate. Live would include health, parenting and family. I'm not clear where hard news would fall.
A second scenario being discussed is to dump almost everything except Silicon Valley business news.
Matt Mansfield, the paper's former business editor who is heading the change, admits he is not certain about the changes. "I'm skeptical, and I'm running the process," he said.
Newspapers certainly need to take a hard look at themselves to see what their readers want and how best to serve them, while remaining economically viable. I'm not sure if The Mercury News is taking the right direction, but at least they're making changes. They and other papers will learn from the results and hopefully they'll find a model that works for readers, advertisers and the publishers.
We shall see.
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