Standing up and cheering for an increase in classified circulation when auto ads are dropping significantly sounds a lot like whistling past the graveyard. Plus, I notice there's no mention of the more important (and more pricey) display advertising sales. I'm guessing that if those numbers had went up, the papers would be trumpeting them as well.

I can't believe you tried to take on this project by yourself, Mark. You should have had at least eight focus groups before debuting this information. How dare you start a conversation about the future of our business in such a cavalier manner. Tsk, tsk.

Seriously, way to go. I'm no business/math/marketing/circulation whiz so this has all been very helpful to me. Thanks!

Not to play devil's advocate too much, but when someone argues that the success of a redesign ought to be measured in classified ad sales, I think I'm probably not the only one to react with: "Huh?"

If that's really the measuring stick, then couldn't one argue, why not just redesign the classified section/listings? Because I can't imagine those sales are really driven by how many fancy new colored boxes are now on the front page, and how many photos are cropped into an upside-down "L."

So is Mary saying in point 3 that a newspaper redesigned for reasons OTHER than attracting readers? I don't buy that. That's like saying a single man bought a Dodge Viper because he thought it was "pretty." No, he bought it to attract women. If a newspaper just wanted to "update" an old product, then they're doing it because they hope readers will be attracted to the new product. It all boils down to attracting more readers AND more buyers (I know the two are different), which lead to more ads being sold. It still is a business, after all.

You've got to expect a reaction as was delivered by the readers. Even though Mark keeps saying he thought it would be interesting and wasn't trying to imply anything (even went as far as to say there was no conclusive evidence that could be gathered by the graphs), it was too little too soon, and in some respects, misleading.

Of course, it did, however, spur up some decent debate and conversation, which may have been his intent all along...

Circulation seems like a good enough measure to Mr. Jacobson when he suggests tying journalists wages to circulation ... not, eh hem, classified advertising revenue.
"Everyone from the executive editor to the obit clerk should have a portion of their compensatory package tied to circulation performance," he says.
Wonder if he's offered Bakersfield a refund of part of his redesign fee.

Does anybody knows how is the Journal and Courier (the first North American daily to switch to the Berliner format) doing???

Does anybody knows how is the Journal and Courier (the first North American daily to switch to the Berliner format) doing???

Andrew Ryan, I've never met you. But if I ever do, your first drink of choice is on me.

That's the most dead-on-the-money post in this site's history.

...

Nobody's discounting the valid points all the dissenters to Mark's figures have made.

Nobody is discounting them.

Nobody.

Just so we're clear, those are valid points. Classified revenue is important. All the other points are well-taken.

But how dare ANYBODY try to spin away, gloss over or flat-out discount falling circulation trends?

The fact one such dissenter recently suggested MY salary should be tied to circulation trends takes it from insult to slap in the face.

True or false: We are in the business of attracting readers to our product?

True or false?

False, Josh. If that's our mission, I'm ready for that long-anticipated jump to a front-line job in the food services industry.

First, what we do is not a "product." News, information, advertising ... all services. Pizza is a product, but its delivery is a service. All the printed newspaper, or a Web site, is is a delivery method.

So what is our service mission?

Our mission should be to enhance our respective communities by informing, entertaining and engaging them -- and enabling them to participate in all three.

Attracting attention is easy. Strip down and run through town square if that's what you want.

Engaging communities is hard. We place way too much faith in our own notions of "news" as something that automatically engages people.

The debate over whether redesigns move the needle, one way or another, in the newspaper business grows tiresome when we all fall back on our own job descriptions as excuses to keep thinking the way we always have.

Designers seem to want excuses to keep on designing. Writers want to write. Editors want to edit. Ad sales execs want to keep selling space on paper. So they all just keep thinking the fault lies somewhere downstream from their work.

Want to see what's wrong with the newspaper industry, folks? Take a look in the mirror. I did, and didn't like what I saw (and not just because I have a rather bulbous schnoz and pasty skin).

I'm especially disappointed in the design community for NOT looking beyond the typeface-of-the-month editorial projects and seeing the future:

-- Advertising is information just as important to just as many people as news/editorial.

-- "Circulation" is a completely invalid metric but it's the best we have for the printed newspaper. And almost everywhere, it's down.

-- All the good qualities of a printed newspaper -- detail, fidelity, portability, usability, local focus, broad interests, classified ads, retail price/item ads -- have been trumped by the Internet or other online technologies. Print has no strategic advantages left save one: habit.

-- A redesign project in that world almost has to be holistic: news and ads, retail and classified, print and online, operations and business. Reinvention is more like it. I still hope the design community steps up to that much bigger challenge, and soon.

Jay, you seem to say false to Josh and then proceed to back up his assertion. He wasn't talking about font choices.

That said, you make good points. Everyone wants to put their heads in the sand. It's especially tough for the design community, which has been elevated over the past decade.

I imagine there were many talented stagecoach designers who went on to create lovely early Mercedes and Dusenbergs.

I said false to his mission statement. It isn't about "attracting readers to our product." But you're right, I'm agreeing with most of the rest of his points -- none of the metrics of the newspaper business look all that healthy right now.

What if the circulation numbers had increased at these redesigned newspapers? Would we be as cautious and hesitant to tout their success as we are now about suggesting they've had no impact?

Do you think that if the Star-Tribune saw their circulation go up 20,000 papers instead of dropping 20,000, after being flat for the previous two years, that they wouldn't be crediting their high-profile redesign and readership initiative for the increase?

Jay. I'll stipulate that your post in its entirety is accurate.

I think I can come at it from a different perspective, though, and get at my point better.

Circulation figures are cited by publishers, CEOs and executive editors almost eithout fail every time a round of job cuts happens and another 250 people who have known nothing besides this as a career now have to support themselves and their families without a job.

"Newspaper X announced 500 layoffs this month. Profits didn't meet investor expectations. Publisher Jones cited a continuing decline in circulation — an industrywide trend — as the underlying cause. (Along with the cost of newsprint, of course, even though newsprint's cost has only risen at the rate of inflation.)"

So it may not be ideal for us to characterize our jobs so crassly. But, especially taken in context with Mike's above point, I think in the minds of the people who sign our checks, we are in the business of attracting readers to our product.

But that may just be semantics, beside the larger points in Jay's post, which are pretty dead-on.

When you have paper come in by the trainload on one end of the building and leave on hundreds of trucks on the other end you are most certainly delivering a product AND providing a service.

Newspapers are still capitalized around their core business - delivering newsprint. How many copies you make is important, who you deliver them to is just as important. Modernizing, improving your products AND services is a cost of doing business in a consumer-savvy, branded culture. Only newspapers think it OK to do this every 5 to 25 years.

Name another modern media channel that can get away with undercaptializing it's key assets (information) and non-investing in R&D?

But Robb, it's thinking about a newspaper as a product that results in that overemphasis on assembly line-style production.

The "product" is just the ink on the paper. If people just wanted ink and paper, they'd go to Office Depot for a much better selection. ;-)

The "service" is the information communicated by the forms that ink takes on paper, and the delivery of that information. We overinvest in tools and methods of delivering the ink on paper, and underinvest in tools and methods for delivering the information.

The new world needs designers, but instead of the question "How do we save the paper?" the question should be, "How do we design the news?" across a variety of platforms.

Here are some things the new world needs from designers, and there are probably more:

1. Design the Web sites. Don't leave it to the engineers and ad people.

2. Design the ads to work well with each other on a Web page.

3. Design the news for a mobile phone.

4. Design an effective way to view photos and photo stories on Web pages.

5. Design maps and databases that are truly interactive and easy to use, that go beyond a repurposed gif.

6. Design the video.

7. Design on paper the elements that paper can do best.

The fact is the fundamentals that are driving newspapers are still newsprint-based.

Please consider the following graf as a path from where you are to where you should be.

News is a commodity, a newspaper is a product and on-demand, just-in time, customized delivery in every form possible to wherever your customer may need it is a service strategy that newspapers must own. Doesn't matter if you are delivering analog or digital, physical or virtual. If you can't deliver it - someone else will.

The transition is not going to happen in six months - it may happen over the next six years - but only if the proper investments are made to retool. When you read stories about how much money new owners are investing into newspapers instead of extracting cash then you'll know you have a fighting chance.

Until then - Google, Yahoo and MySpace are executing this thinking better than traditioned media corporations. Why? They have the largest audiences and 80 percent of the ad market.

And they have, as Ballmer loves to say, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers .... ;-)

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