Precised extracts from my email inbox this morning:
“…the Publisher of the Orange County Register in the USA (a newspaper that is the third largest in California) says: “The Register has to become a 21st century business… We can’t have the same model that worked 10 years ago.”
His approach has been to offer premium content in the subscription-
based Register, for a mainly older audience, to offer a hyper-local focus
through free community weeklies, and to attract a younger audience with free content on the newspaper’s website, ocregister.com.
“But this strategy has required a re-engineering of the business.” That’s a decisive, bold move.
Now let’s move to Birmingham, England:
“Trinity Mirror has announced wholesale changes planned for the city’s two daily newspapers. They are to shed around 80 jobs, turning
the Birmingham Post from a daily into a weekly edition and moving the
Mail from an evening to a morning paper.
A motion of opposition has been signed by at least 11 MPs of all
parties.”
I don’t have any further information on the second story but I wonder: These are indeed radical changes and I can’t believe the publisher came up with them without serious consideration of all alternatives. So that begs two questions:
Is this a knee-jerk, vote-catching move by the MPs concerned?
How many jobs will go if the changes aren’t made and the two newspapers cease to exist?
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