Will They Ever Figure It Out?

American Digest:

The "team" responsible for tossing litter onto my lawn every so often grew smaller today. Seattle Times to Cut Approximately 200 Employees via The Stranger "Seattle's Only Newspaper"

A memo just promulgated onto the web by the odious "Stranger" details the reasons for the mass sackings -- 45 from the newsroom. [Full text after the jump] The money shot is right up on top with

Our circumstances are in line with the newspaper industry nationally, which continues to see steep declines particularly in areas of Classified ad revenue and also a slowing of online revenue growth.

Translation: 1) Craigslist bites deep in high-tech metro areas these days, so deep that large bleeding chunks of staff are now being torn from the news body. 2) Online revenue ain't making it either since who wants to go to the website of a dead-tree product they don't read in the first place? And even if they did, the money sites get from ads online just isn't at all in the realm of what they get for print ads.

Online ad revenues, often touted by blathering publishers with "a vision", never have and never will replace the revenue lost to the print edition.

Of course, the real elephant drooling in the room of newspapers like the Seattle Times these days is "the forgotten reader." These are the potential readers who, because of the unremitting liberal tone and slant of the Times in both the news hole and on the editorial page, loathe the Times and the whole sector of Seattle society it represents.

Now you may say, in a town as overwhelmingly liberal as Seattle, "Screw those troglodyte, Republican morons!" Well, you can say that but then you will, sooner or later, fire 200 of your employees. And that will be only the start.

Why? Because in an "overwhelmingly liberal town" you are talking about, at most, around 55% of the potential readership that agrees with you. This means you are leaving about 45% of potential readership out of the equation altogether. King County has about 2 million people. That means that 45% of potential readership is not at all a trivial number, and yet the Seattle Times takes every opportunity to alienate them. Result: Mass sackings and many millions lost.

And yet the Seattle Times, as well as numerous other newspapers now dying in the US, never ever cops to its point of view as the reason why it is failing...

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Give me a newspaper that provides what I get from blog reading, and I'll happily buy it. I'd much rather read stuff on paper than from a computer screen.