"I can get insulted for free"

Stacy McCain has a good article about the financial slide of the Washington Post.  You can take the problem the Post has and make the same observations about pretty much any newspaper.  The fact is that the people who write and edit the paper forget that the people who spend 75 cents or a $1.50 are the customer.  When you read the articles and the editorials they seem to be writing for each other; that when the paper is printed they can give each other high fives and tell each other how clever they are.

I have often asked: why would I spend my money on a paper that dislikes my ethics, my morals my religion and my values and insults them every chance it gets.  I can get insulted for free.

McCain: 

Write for the reader.

This seems so obvious to non-journalists that it feels stupid saying it so simply, but too many people in the news business completely lose sight of the fact that the reader is their customer, and is under no obligation to consume your product. You must try to write something that people actually want to read, and try to keep the readership in mind. Your boss is ultimately not the editor, but rather the guy who drops 50 cents in the newspaper box.”

The Virginian Pilot was recently handed a great story on a silver platter.  Two of its reporters were attacked by a gang of “youths” at a stop light.  A rock was thrown at the car’s windshield and when the driver got out to confront the thrower, he was assailed by a mob of black males.  His female passenger tried to rescue him but was also assaulted.  This story had all the characteristics of a great story: violence, drama, crime and race.  What did the Virginian Pilot do?  They did nothing.  No story, no report, nothing.  We only found out about it two weeks later when an op-ed was written about this incident.  The story then became a national sensation, including segments on the O’Reilly Factor. 

Who or what was behind the decision to bury the story?  Certainly no one  with an interest in his readership.  To this day the editor of the Virginian Pilot maintains that the story about this attack is not newsworthy enough to get even an inch of news column space.  The paper then published an editorial Norfolk needs a civil conversation that spent most of its ink venomously attacking callers, e-mailers and bloggers for giving their opinions on this subject.  The editorial writer attacked people “ … who[m] couldn’t locate Hampton Roads on a map.”  A reader asked: “How many members of the VP staff could have located Sanford, Florida, on a map before they joined the chorus and took it upon themselves to tell us what this attack meant and how we all should react in its aftermath?” 

The point is that you don’t have to be a resident of Hampton Roads to know that the Virginian Pilot is written by and for its liberal staff.  It’s the reason that it’s losing the people who are not on the Pilot payroll; a characteristic it shares with the Washington Post.