Local Paper Making A Comeback In Tough Economic Climate

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. –Thomas Jefferson

Following the City of Omaha’s bail-out of the Omaha World-Herald on April 1st, the new public-private partnership running the paper deserves high marks for business acumen and for deploying cost-cutting strategies needed to save everyone’s favorite local paper. Here are just a few of the recent innovations:

• Rename the OWH printing press and buggy whip manufacturing facility (presently called The John Gottschalk Freedom Center) to The John Gottschalk Bondage Center, because the $125 million it took to build will never be repaid. A tribute to the man who fought the Internet every inch of the way. And lost.
• Turn the online edition at Omaha.com into a giant teaser for the print edition. Publish online articles that go like this: “A tornado is approaching Omaha, destroying everything in its path, and due to pass through the nuclear power plant at Fort Calhoun in 15 minutes . . . See Wednesday’s print or e-edition for details.”
• Play to your base. The only people still willing to receive four pounds of advertising circulars wrapped in five articles about Husker spring training and high school girls volleyball are dead or dying, so feature photos with the obits (This is your big day!) and put them where the op-eds used to be, right next to the Public Has No Pulse and ads for dentures, hearing aids, and mortuary “prearrangements”.
• Publishing original articles is cost-prohibitive. Borrow from other publications whenever possible.
• Dump Western Nebraska. No one reads out there anyway.
• Lay-offs and across-the-board salary reductions are unavoidable in the embattled newspaper industry, but spare no expense on extravagant parties for retiring publishers: parades, floats, marching bands, dancing penguins, the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, beauty queens, clowns, Wayne Newton, all the stuff you’d expect to find at a highbrow publishing soiree.

Rumor has it that the paper is about to make a major announcement in the coming weeks and some speculate it could be beyond huge. Whispers that Rainbow Rowell is coming back? No, even bigger. More lay-offs? Of course! But the paper also plans to reprint old Bob McMorris and Harold Andersen columns. So relief is in sight for all of those hip young Web surfers frustrated by the online edition’s 7-day archive search limit when trying to access Harold’s opinion pieces from days of yore. Of course they still will have to see Wednesday’s print or e-edition for details.

• New Omaha.com?
• Life After Newspapers