Desperately Seeking the News
by Matt Pulle
Is Albie Del Favero the same visionary who built the Scene from a harmless shopper to a booming alt-weekly? Or is he a cranky has-been who never should have emerged from retirement to take the publisher’s job at The City Paper?We’ll soon find out.
Eight years after it first rolled off the presses, the free daily is positioning itself to become an online-only publication in a move that will reduce costs—and maybe threaten the paper’s limited advertiser base.
“In the not-too-distant future, that’s how most readers, particularly the ones that advertisers care about the most, are going to be getting their daily news,” he writes the Scene in an email.
Del Favero, who held the same job with aplomb at the Scene for 15 years, first hinted at his paper’s looming transition in a little-noticed trade press release in November.
“Our readers are more likely to read The City Paper at their desks in the morning. And what we found was that, increasingly, more of them were actually reading the paper online,” he said then. “Because of that online readership growth and the expense of delivering the paper each and every day, we are slowly evolving the paper from a print product to a primarily digital product.”
A somewhat cagey Del Favero won’t divulge the finer points of his plans, but it’s a safe bet that a Web-only City Paper, which is already hindered by a dwindling cast of reporters, would require a stripped-down focus and staff (kind of like NashvillePost.com). Still, the concept of an exclusively online publication is not unlike the Fox Business Network: an idea that sounds good until it’s executed. Even Del Favero, who says he has no timeline for the paper’s digital evolution, acknowledges that many advertisers aren’t going to follow him into the ink-free wild.
“Some will. Some won’t. But all you have to do is look at trends (and your own 72-page paper last week) to see where we’re headed,” Del Favero says, taking a jab at the Scene. “Newspaper advertising revenue is plummeting, and where’s it going? Online. When final numbers are released for 2007, total newspaper advertising revenue will show a drop in the low double digits. Meanwhile, online advertising was up over 25 percent in the third quarter. Retailers in Nashville aren’t hip to the trends yet (no surprise), but they will be soon enough.”
In fact, the Scene’s more profitable than it was before Del Favero left, during which time the paper also has experimented with a new and revolutionary practice: hiring more reporters to write stories for both the paper and the website. And, yes, Desperately realizes that he may not be that objective, but there’s a cautionary note here nonetheless: Before we experiment with an entirely new model of journalism, maybe we should work a little harder at the old one.
Cleaning up after Del Favero
Chris Ferrell, yet another former Scene publisher pondering life in a new media world, will be running NashvillePost.com after his start-up company, SouthComm Communications, finalized the purchase of the online news site this week. It’s more of a switch of stationery than anything else. Venture capitalist Townes Duncan is the majority owner of both NashvillePost and SouthComm, though this maneuver will pave the way for the new publishing company to launch and acquire other media properties in Nashville and beyond.
So what to make of the aforementioned City Paper, which is hoping to stake a claim in NashvillePost’s interweb territory? Would Ferrell’s new outfit be looking at buying his looming rival?
“I’m looking at a lot of things,” Ferrell says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re looking back.”
Quote unquote
In its own way, The Tennessean is also experimenting with the traditional journalism model, only its new approach isn’t intriguing or innovative, just lazy and off-putting. Last week, in an intricate story about the aftermath of the laptop heist at the Davidson County Election Commission, the newspaper quoted the usual suspects—along with someone named Doug Gilbert, described only as a “Nashville resident.” Gilbert doesn’t work at the election commission or anywhere in Metro. He’s not a technology expert or security guru. Just an affable private citizen who sent an email to The Tennessean.
“I didn’t know I was going to be quoted,” Gilbert tells Desperately. He figured his email would be posted online or as a letter to the editor, and he never even spoke to the reporter.
On Sunday, in a Tennessean story about lottery scholarships, the paper quoted Gov. Phil Bredesen at length—and retired firefighter Charles Hampton. How did the paper discover him?
“My wife probably emailed them, and they called her and she wasn’t there, so they spoke to me,” he says, revealing the paper’s intricate reporting process.
Typically, newspapers don’t quote regular citizens in the course of a wonky news story if they have no extraordinary insight into the issues. But, according to former staffers, The Tennessean instructs its reporters to include a “voice of outrage” quote in its stories, even in cases when that outrage is relatively generic. It goes right along with the paper’s practice of relinquishing much of its editorial and op-ed space to bloggers and citizens.
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