Monday, October 10, 2005
On yer 3rd birthday...
A post at NewsDesigner.com (scroll down just a bit) copies a RedEye staff memo about the paper's 3rd anniversary (late October). Here's my reply to a few bits from that:
For those of you who have watched RedEye evolve, you know that we've had an ongoing commitment to change and have adapted our content, design and advertising options in response to readers' and advertisers' needs.
Evolve? Perhaps in the classic biological sense—slowly and damn near imperceptibly.
On Monday, RedEye will experience another change, and remove its cover price to become FREE to readers throughout Chicago. We believe this change will make it even easier and more convenient for readers to pick up a copy every day-and increase readership.
This is a good thing.
We look forward to sharing more exciting improvements with you in the upcoming weeks and months.
Some suggestions:
-Find a permanent place to put corrections. Some days they're on 4, some days on 5... Readers will get used to seeing them only if you put them in a permanent place. Moving them around is childish and sloppy. Show people that you care about getting facts right.
-Stop printing boring cover photos!
-Stop printing boring cover stories! Tell your audience about something new, not the things they already care about. Leave the dieting stories to Shape or whatever. In a news market, the supplier shapes the demand as much as the consumer.
-Get more reporters to develop RedEye-specific story angles with Tribune reporters. In today's issue, two stories have RedEye affiliated bylines—the diet story and the R. Kelly story. R. Kelly blows and diets are not news, haven't been for ages (same with the accompanying display type: "New fads promise results," "Americans don't use common sense when looking for easy diet"). It's got "perfunctory" written all over it. Everything else is Trib or wire, not counting those aberrations of nature who pass as "columnists" in this paper.
-Kill all those columnists and establish a real opinion page.
For those of you who have watched RedEye evolve, you know that we've had an ongoing commitment to change and have adapted our content, design and advertising options in response to readers' and advertisers' needs.
Evolve? Perhaps in the classic biological sense—slowly and damn near imperceptibly.
On Monday, RedEye will experience another change, and remove its cover price to become FREE to readers throughout Chicago. We believe this change will make it even easier and more convenient for readers to pick up a copy every day-and increase readership.
This is a good thing.
We look forward to sharing more exciting improvements with you in the upcoming weeks and months.
Some suggestions:
-Find a permanent place to put corrections. Some days they're on 4, some days on 5... Readers will get used to seeing them only if you put them in a permanent place. Moving them around is childish and sloppy. Show people that you care about getting facts right.
-Stop printing boring cover photos!
-Stop printing boring cover stories! Tell your audience about something new, not the things they already care about. Leave the dieting stories to Shape or whatever. In a news market, the supplier shapes the demand as much as the consumer.
-Get more reporters to develop RedEye-specific story angles with Tribune reporters. In today's issue, two stories have RedEye affiliated bylines—the diet story and the R. Kelly story. R. Kelly blows and diets are not news, haven't been for ages (same with the accompanying display type: "New fads promise results," "Americans don't use common sense when looking for easy diet"). It's got "perfunctory" written all over it. Everything else is Trib or wire, not counting those aberrations of nature who pass as "columnists" in this paper.
-Kill all those columnists and establish a real opinion page.
