Favre Coverage Helps Explain the Death of Newspapers

Now, I no longer read a newspaper on a regular basis but that has more to do with poor decisions made by the industry than any inherent failing built into the product. Yes, newspapers have a huge time factor working against them, plus I hate how they pile up and shudder at the trees killed to make them, but those things collectively do not account for why I no longer read newspapers.

Let us start with the advantages newspapers enjoy. Obviously, the name brand and years of experience should put a newspaper well ahead of any competitor. Newspapers are light and portable. You can highlight useful passages, tear out articles that interest you and write brief notes in the margin. They include tons of coupons that can easily pay for the cost of the newspaper and probably save you decent money if you are the organized type.

Perhaps best of all is that a collection of news, weather, sports, business, lifestyle, TV listings and comics comes in one neat package, delivered to your doorstep by a certain time each morning. How can newspapers fail at all? This is a product that should command a premium price, not 50 cents a day and two dollars on Sunday.

People say all of the time that the Internet killed the newspaper business. While there is some truth to that statement, the real reasons are a lot more complex. Yes, 50 cents is cheap but it is still hard to get people to give you 50 cents if they can get the same exact thing for free online.

So do not give them the same thing! Why did (and do) newspapers have such a hard time grasping that concept?

I like sports. One of the main things that would get me to subscribe to a newspaper would be sports content I could not get elsewhere. But newspapers just do not do that. They still insist on giving the same coverage they did before the Internet and even before ESPN came on the scene.

Last night a football game occurred that you might have heard between the Vikings and the Packers. Now, this was two division rivals, who both have good teams, competng for a spot atop the NFC North. And of course there was the whole Brett Favre saga, which pretty much everyone is tired of but still gets beat into our heads on a daily basis in case we did not get it the first 10,000 times it was reported.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune online has a pretty good Vikings section. And here were some of their headlines on the big game:

Packer Smacker: Favre burns ex-teammates
Brett Favre on the Pacers showdown
Even in purple, "Silver Fox" has golden touch
The Brett Beat: Grading the QB
Gruden calls game one of Favre's best

And that does not include the game story, which was predominantly Favre-based. Now, I think it is great that the newspaper had all of this Vikings coverage (and more) but these were all stories that I could get elsewhere. Shoot, I watched the game and that was what they talked about all night. I watched SportsCenter after the game and they showed the entire Brett Favre press conference.

Today when I woke up, I wanted to see what inside information I could get from the paper in Minneapolis that I could not get anywhere else. Because you know that Web sites like ESPN, Yahoo!, CBS Sports and a dozen others were all covering the Favre angle into the ground, too. What could the people who follow the team on a daily basis tell me that the major news organizations, here for the Favre circus only, could not?

Was there a story about Bernard Berrian working his way into the offense?
Was there a story why the defensive line was getting pressure from the front four, piling up sacks by themselves. but the D-coordinator continued to blitz, leaving the secondary open for big plays?
Was there a story on what the Vikings did/should do to get more running room for Adrian Peterson? How about Peterson's problems with fumbles?
Was there a story on Visanthe Shiancoe becoming a TD force in the red zone?
Was there a story on the wisdom of utilizing the Wildcat offense in the game?

Because all of these, and dozens more, are the types of stories that would get me to subscribe to a newspaper. Now, because I live in North Carolina, I cannot get home delivery of the Star-Tribune, but the point can be extrapolated to any town in the country.

Furthermore, the point can be extrapolated from sports to any other section of the newspaper. I can read anywhere online about health care, the Middle East, the Dow Jones, Jon and Kate or Kanye. What can my local newspaper add to the story to make it worthwhile for me to read about it there later than at the national Web sites? Because if the newspaper cannot add to the basic story it is kind of pointless to cover the topic at all.

The internet did not kill newspapers. I read more now than I did when I lived in New York and had access to four newspapers a day and yet I still want more. If newspapers played their cards right, online news could have been the starting point and the newspapers the final destination for authority on a subject. Instead of looking to spread out and cover a wide net of stories, newspapers should have dug down, to deliver more depth on a subject than the national guys could. If that meant covering fewer stories, that would be a small price to pay for continued relevance in the 21st Century. Instead, I ignore newspapers and hunt for blogs to give me stories not found on the major Web sites.

The extensive Favre coverage was great (I guess). I just wish it had been on a subject not already covered to death elsewhere. The papers dug deep but on a topic already well covered by the national media. So even when they get it right, they still manage to screw it up. This morning at 7 AM, the fact that Favre threw three TD passes to lead the Vikings to a win over the Packers (or any Favre item) was no longer news. The national sites had that seven hours ago. Stop telling me what I already know and instead give me something more.

My parents are in their 80s and until recently they subscribed to three newspapers. They cut down to two papers because the yearly price of home delivery for an out-of-state paper became equal to the cost of a large appliance. My mother-in-law is in her 60s and she subscribes to one newspaper. I am in my 40s, would love to subscribe to a newspaper so my kids could have the same experience I did growing up, but cannot find one worth either my time or money.

Instead, I am teaching my son how to use Google to search for what interests him. Right now that is free online Batman games but one day it will be something else. It is doubtful he will ever look to a newspaper as a primary source for current events. But maybe one day when he is researching something from the 1950s, he will come across a newspaper as a primary source and wonder how something so wonderful became so useless.

And I'll tell him there is more to life than Brett Favre.