Seahawks Insider Blog Unplugged Due to Staff Shortage

Seth over Sports NW just tipped us off to the bad news regarding the Tacoma News Tribune's Seahawks Insider blog, which won't be updated until training camp. Ironically, the blog's tagline reads: "Where there is no off season."

*cough*

Frank Hughes explains the situation in a post:

As you may have heard last week, the chain that owns the paper, McClatchy, announced that it is laying off 10 percent of its work force, which in our case meant 86 people at the News Tribune. Those cuts were inevitable because "more with less" has been the mantra at our paper and most other papers across the country for some time now. While that sounds like a nice notion, what it really means is that there will be tangible losses of quality material somewhere, and one of those places is in the blogs when reporters go on vacation.

While Frank's gone, no blog, is the long and short of it. Kinda hard to keep readership up that way, unless the readers all agree to go on vacation, too.

God help us, we're not MBAs and we don't understand how newspapers are planning on pulling out their tailspins by cutting the people responsible for their primary product: news. Slash print production costs? Sure. Delivery costs? Hell yes. Can a shitload of reporters and stuff the paper with AP filler? Uh, wait a sec...can't we get that from AP?

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By MvB in News on June 26, 2008 1:55 PM

Comments [rss]

MvB

seatown22: I read about Ivey closing, too. They were still profitable, even! I used to be in there a lot, back when they were Ivey-Seright. I see Panda is still hanging in there.

seatown22

Well, today I found out that my film lab is closing (Ivey), and now the blog I visit most every day- Seattle is sucking more every day, here I come Portland......

ruffhauser

I for one will not shed a tear when the P-I goes under.

MvB

That's exactly what I find fascinating, bigyaz. Every other content provider on the internet would kill for the daily, regular readership that newspapers have, and yet they haven't been able to monetize it.

Display advertising dollars haven't followed the online traffic. Online subscriptions haven't worked (so far). And of course newspapers have never replaced the classifieds revenue they ceded to Craigslist and eBay.

But I wouldn't call reducing production and delivery costs simplistic--it's an enormously complex area. Yes, there have been cuts, and the search for efficiencies continues. (I believe the P-I is looking at shrinking its page size.)

My point is that newspapers are facing a sales problem, not an over-staffing problem. If corporate can't figure out how to sell a product as popular as news, maybe they ought to lay themselves off first.

bigyaz

Michael: The problem for newspapers isn't so much readers (while print circulation has fallen some, online readership is quite high) as it is advertisers. You can be putting out a great, news-packed product these days, but there just isn't advertising to support it.

No matter how many readers the Seahawks blog has, online advertising can't come close to paying the salaries of Frank Hughes and other contributors. Now, if you can come up with a solution for that one there are plenty of publishers who would love to hear from you. But I can assure you simplistic "solutions" like reducing production and delivery costs were tried a long time ago.