August 6th, 2008 by Kent Davy
How dumb is this:
Even as television proliferates in choices (the 500 channel problem) and total viewership (even though the individual channel slices are shrinking), the newspaper industry has devoted gobs of expensive newsprint to promote their chief competitor.
What else would you call a television listings book but layer upon layer of free promotional material advertising what’s on CBS or AMC or ESPN at 8 p.m.?
Unfortunately, newspapers never figured out how to cash in on this great giveaway and now that newspapers are trimming or eliminating television books, their readers are blaming the newspapers.
In fielding about 150 complaints this week, I haven’t heard a single complaint lodged against television itself for not providing an easy to use listing service.
Figures.
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August 6th, 2008 by Kent Davy
This week has been an object lesson in the concept that there are three kinds of owners of a newspaper: The owners by title; those who write, edit and produce the paper; and, mostly importantly, the readers.
In this case, an attempt to trim costs in the newsroom by eliminating eight pages from the weekly TV book (the movie synopses were cut out) has sparked at least 150 angry telephone messages mostly by older readers.
Their complaints are mostly that television is their primary source of entertainment and that they have no other source of information to see what movies they may wish to watch, being part of the pre-computer demographic slice.
The anger is justified — nobody likes losing a useful and favorite feature of the newspaper — but in the end may not be assuaged.
The savings in newsprint is equivalent to two reporters, and pushed to that choice I would rather have reporters.
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