The Printer’s Devil

Jump to Comments

A few years back, I always ran a feature offered by Associated Press. I don’t remember the name of it but each week, some reading expert would adapt an AP story into a short story geared to kids. The story would generally be about something popular with kids such as dinosaur discoveries, planets or snakes eating cuddly animals.

Then the expert would put a quiz at the end, ranging from multiple choice, true-and-false and essays.

I knew kids read and did the quizzes. I received phone calls from kids asking about more obscure questions they couldn’t answer (I couldn’t answer them either, I might add.)

Once in a while, I would offer prizes or gift certificates to kids who mailed in the answers. I wasn’t overwhelmed by responses but I got enough to make it worthwhile, at least to me.

Suddenly, Associated Press stopped putting them on the wire.

I called New York to find out if they had made a mistake.

A nice lady informed me that AP had discontinued the feature for lack of interest. Indeed, I was the only person who had bothered to call about it, she said.

And CorpsNews publishers worry about the youth of America not reading newspapers.

Some papers have tried — they started Newspaper In Education programs, in which newspapers are sent to schools to get school children to read newspapers early, hoping to create a reading habit early.

For some reason, newspapers don’t seem to stick with it. They get tired of it or don’t want to spend the money or take the effort

Instead they figure gimmicks like “newspimping,” or as one of my gurus for this site calls it, “New Age Fad Journalism,” will be an easy, cheap and fast way to bring readers back to newspapers.

From my and my gurus’ observations, it doesn’t.

So what to do?

Celebrate reading. Treat your readers with respect. As I mentioned last time, CorpsNews talk a great game about attracting and keeping readers but do those things that tend to alienate or drive them away.

So what to do? Here are a few examples I’m aware of:

• When I had the authority or was persuasive enough I would turn an inside page into a “book page” once a week.

I would occasionally feature a local writer — there can be a surprising number of them in any one area, many of whom were good, cadger librarians to do weekly columns about new books or activities at the library, and print other snippets about people contributing to magazines.

The small dailies I worked at were in communities that had small universities or community colleges and there was also a professor or student who had contributed to a publication and those would be at the least a news brief.

Associated Press usually did a book-related story each week and that got slapped onto the page. Unlike other papers, I avoided putting the top 10 movies of the week or the best-selling CD but I printed the list of best-selling books.

• I, and a few other people I know, delight in throwing in a heavy-duty or big word or two into news stories.

You’d be surprised by the number of readers who like it.

A nicely-turned phrase or even a subtle pun or play on words gets passed around among readers. I found that challenging readers instead of patronizing them tends to keep them readers.

• Somebody I know had a ploy I sure loved.

He had gotten stuck with the doing his paper’s TV listings tabloid each week.

He got to thinking why the newspaper was encouraging readers to watch TV instead? Most TV tabs have photos of hot starlets or breathless descriptions of the hot shows.

He knew that they would watch TV any way but he decided he hadn’t see anything written that required him to give free advertising to a medium that would distract people from reading the newspaper.

So he ditched the hot starlet stories and photos. He started putting stories about books or more featurey Sunday stories in the TV listings.

If he put anything about TV in the TV tab, it was those stories and scandals that put the TV industry in a bad light, such as cable networks squabbles with sports networks or greedy TV executives — he called it his campaign of subversion.

Actually, his subversion worked. He put in an unflattering story about cable TV and the next week, the local cable TV company put an ad in the TV tab, which was followed the next week by a satellite TV company reiterating the unflattering cable TV story, which prompted another ad from the cable TV company.

The paper’s TV tab, a long-time dog when it came to ads, was suddenly full of warring ads.

Sometimes, virtue isn’t its only reward.