Sunday, January 20, 2008

The death of local lifestyles pages in newspapers

I read with sadness the latest news to come out of GateHouse Media.
Editor & Publisher reports the recently formed GateHouse News Service will soon produce lifestyles pages for newspapers:

Pages include "Health & Fitness" on Monday, "Food" on Tuesday, "Home & Garden" on Wednesday, and "Travel" on Thursday. They can be used by GateHouse Media Inc. publications as well as other subscribers, and are customizable to allow for local content and ads.

There are also weekly videos associated with the pages -- including a cooking show, fitness and home and garden tips, and travel tours.


This is the last thing the beleaguered newspaper industry needs- more cookie-cutter, non-local content for a medium whose mantra should be local, local, local. And, of course, it goes without saying there will be newspapers that will use this service as an excuse for eliminating reporting positions.
GateHouse's local newspapers, The Carthage Press and the Neosho Daily News have long ago abandoned the idea of providing daily local lifestyles pages (I have even seen some editions that did not have editorial pages) and while both newspapers do include some of what has been featured on these pages in the past, the absence of such pages is one more reason why these newspapers have seen their circulations decline from approximately 5,000 in 1999 to just over 2,100 in October 2007 (Newspapers that go through the U. S. Mail are required to print a circulation statement each October.)

What has happened to lifestyles coverage?

The staples of such coverage have been coverage of education, food, fashion, health issues, and more importantly than anything, coverage of people. While I have no particular problem with using syndicated materials to bolster coverage, the main emphasis in most cases should be local.

During my years at The Carthage Press, I tried to redefine the traditional stand-alone lifestyles coverage, which in many cases had earned its reputation for poor writing, and more emphasis on certain segments of the community.

First, lifestyles stories can be built around local stories that would not appear on traditional lifestyles pages. For several years in the 1990s, The Press was lucky enough to have Amy Lamb as its lifestyles editor. Amy accompanied the children of murder victims Harold and Melba Wampler of Jasper to the execution of the man who killed their parents. She later did a profile of an incarcerated child molester who wanted to warn about people like himself.
Amy mixed that coverage with features on students, women's club coverage, and numerous stories about health. Many of her stories landed on page one with sidebars on the lifestyles page. Nowadays, the odds of someone as talented as Amy ever getting a chance to do that type of well-rounded work are almost non-existent.

At The Press, every reporter was a feature writer. In addition to our coverage of news events, we regularly wrote features on the people who took part in those events and we also had regular photo features, especially on events that were a part of the community, events ranging from the annual football and basketball homecomings to the Midwest Gathering of the Arts to the annual Maple Leaf Gospel Sing. Our idea of lifestyles coverage was actually covering the lives of people in the community, a concept that seems antiquated these days.

Speakering of the Midwest Gathering of the Artists, the culture beat has also been almost forgotten at the smaller GateHouse newspapers in this area. When I arrived at The Carthage Press in 1990, the newspaper had veteran leadership like Managing Editor Neil Campbell and former Managing Editor Marvin VanGilder who knew the importance art and music played in the community, not just aesthetically, but with the emergence of Precious Moments and Red Oak II, financially. It was a major beat for The Press, and was expanded even more after Ron Graber joined the staff in August 1992. We had articles on the arts several times a week.

Now, with staffs cut to the bone and so much emphasis placed on special sections and advertorial material, the type of coverage that made newspapers eminently readable has almost entirely vanished.

Another culprit has been the growing number of niche magazines created by GateHouse and other newspaper companies (including CNHI, owner of the Joplin Globe). These publications are jam-packed with features (though again, most of them appear to be of the cookie-cutter variety). The solution to every perceived hole in reaching advertisers is a new niche publication. Every time one is created, the flagship newspapers die a little more.

So now GateHouse Media has come up with a solution to this problem- outsource the lifestyles pages. Is it any wonder the newspaper industry is dying?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

What happened?

Well, if it's not written by Wally Kennedy down at 117 E. 4th St., then it's not worth it.

Hyper-local coverage -- regardless of Joplin, Carthage or Peoria -- seems to mean school boards and city council meetings.

Most editors don't want the human interest stories, good as they may be. Why offer a low salary and paltry benefits to a reporter if they cannot get the hard news from them?

GateHouse is just following what Gannett, Knight-Ridder (well, when there was a Knight-Ridder) and the like are doing.

Anonymous said...

At least the Neosho Daily - still a Gatehouse paper, I think - has a lot of local columnists writing about local things.

Anonymous said...

Growing up, I remember when the People section of the Joplin Globe on Sundays was always packed with a page and a half of wedding and engagement announcements. My mother and sisters used to fight over who got to read the section first. About 10 years ago, the Globe started charging for such announcements. That killed about 90% of the announcements, and readership of the section.

Busplunge said...

Mary Elizabeth Mahnkey, the crossroads correspondent, would be turning over in her grave.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,847483,00.html?promoid=googlep

Anonymous said...

Yes the Neosho Daily News has lots of local columnists writing weekly pieces, but few of those columns are what I consider lifestyles coverage of the community.

If you click on "Lifestyles" at the NDN web site you see a page with canned videos, a story about a ACS event to be held in March, and Christmas coverage. Very underwhelming.

Dig up some columns and you see that it's primarily either self-centered or historical, neither of which is lifestyles coverage of the community.

Kay Hively's latest piece is all about what she watched on TV lately. Russel Hively is of course writing about the Good Ol' Days. Bob Sneller's column is his favorite quotes. Lori Marble talks about getting her car fixed. Lee Ann Murphy writes about the Good Not-Quite-As-Old-As-Hively Days, Ginny Ray talks about what book she is reading. John Ford's columns, which come the closest to being entertaining, in my opinion, are always about himself, and you can count on Rick Rogers to write about his family week after week.

None of this is lifestyle coverage.

Anonymous said...

Randy, your post is a knee-jerk response to a subject you have absolutely no knowledge of. Content like this has been around on intra-company wires for years. All it does is provide some supplementary and complementary content for papers put with their local content.

And even if a paper does run the pages in full, without local content, don't tell me that it won't be read. Local papers run Parade and American Family magazines every week. Generic lifestyles sections work, because people like to read about stories they can relate to, whether they live in the same town or not. If it's a quality story about a good topic, people will want to read it.

Anonymous said...

Not sure what the complaint is...the Neosho Daily runs a Senior Life page, a Today's Woman page, a Food page, a Health page, a Faith page, a Devotional page, a Home and Garden page, a Neighbors page, a School Zone page (five times a week) and an Arts and Life page — all with almost exclusive local angels 90 percent of the time. There ARE occasional exceptions, but with a small newsroom we can't do everything all of the time.