They do stupid things. Like switching James Lileks, one of the most interesting bloggers and writers on the Internet, from column writing to hard news. Talk about putting a square peg in a round hole. Lileks’ blog, which a friend got me reading about 2000, is atypical. The fact that thousands (millions?) of people read his daily bleats about his day, his daughter, going to the school bus, fighting with his yard’s water feature, is a testament to his writing. It’s not just-the-facts writing that is found in straight news. As he says today in his bleat, that’s not his strong suit. As a great editor once told me, any newspaper should play to strength when assigning people. The Minneapolis Star Tribune hasn’t done it with Lileks.
But that’s not unusual. Newspapers have been rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship for years. They react to every management fad, every reader consultant’s bizarre suggestion and come up with a few of their own to try to stanch the bleeding. Some, like The Herald-Sun‘s new owners in Durham, simply cut and cut and cut to try to keep the ink black. The News & Observer, on the other hand, has put personnel into all kinds of different deck chairs recently to try to pump life into the product. Just this week they’ve unveiled a new Page 2 of the local page, billing it as a page whose content is produced by readers. Hate to tell them, but The Herald-Sun did that 15 years ago.
