A year ago McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder. That was about $1.5 billion in market cap ago, as the company’s stock has done a nose-dive. Coincidence? I think not. But there are larger forces at work here than McClatchy over-paying for KR, which it almost surely did.

It is easy to say the Intertubes are killing newspapers, but that does not quite satisfy. Afterall, papers are getting better — at least most of them — at handling online content, yet newspaper sites are still not drawing eyeballs. Might it be the content and not the medium?

I stumbled on — this being an Intertube and all — an interesting critique of how copy and content can turn off readers. It was specifically aimed at ad copy, but see if it doesn’t apply to news copy or edit pages as well:

1: Internet surfing has trained us to disregard empty words.
2: Relevance has become more important than repetition.

Bottom line: Meaningful messages are working better than ever, especially when the fundamental premise of your ad is clearly stated in the opening line. Ads full of unsupported claims and overworked “image-building” phrases are being rejected before they ever enter the brain. So say what matters. Say it tight, say it true.

The audience is still there. What’s gone is their willingness to pay attention to drivel.

You spend about a minute each day going though the mail delivered by the Post Office, right? Before Yahoo and Google came along, those 6 minutes each week constituted your total weekly exercise in the high-speed evaluation of content. But now you’re spending more than a quarter-hour per day scanning search engine results and web pages for relevant, meaningful, salient information. These daily quarter-hours are teaching you – and your customers – to more quickly recognize and disregard word-fluff and other irrelevant information. We’re learning to filter out hyperbole and empty phrases.

That’s from self-dubbed “ad wizard” Roy H. Williams. Does “hyperbole and empty phrases” describe much of what passes for traditional news reporting? Thought so.

Didn’t the Observer just spend the past couple of days on an “image-building” campaign on the question of five-year-olds on dirtbikes? First, a wholly manufactured story called into being by asking a state lawmaker a set-up question, then a predictably outraged editorial. Wait here’s the solution editorial: Government action. Talk about tired and overworked. It is not just that it is formula journalism, it is that it is the same damn formula over and over.

Before that, it was the transit tax petition drive. Manufactured story with an overworked theme, an unsupported claim — the public is being misled — bzzzt, people tune out. The hysterical thing is the tune-out is mistaken for lack of understanding, that people do not understand the issues or what is being written about them. The obvious solution? Dumb it down some more.

Put some more pictures in and try to “engage” readers’ emotions. Heaven knows they don’t have any sense. And round and round it goes until — until what? Until no one reads your paper or no one buys ads in it, or more likely, it just ceases to have any real influence.

Is that what year two of McClatchy will bring?