In the two great cities of the land of many lakes;
There will be room for as many papers of news daily;
And in addition telling visions, webbed logs;
Talk of rayed Io, weak lees, and in deem ideas.

Yet how many of these shall truly thrive;
Will not be the election of those learned in reading;
It shall come to pass that a Knight of name Parr;
And a Dean of two thousand pounds order the matter.

is there room enough for two crappy papers that merely republish week old NYT and wire stories while NOT bothering to cover actual local news?

sorry, but i'm bitter.

Agreed.

The tactic to rid the paper of any local connection, specifically with their columnists, only adds to its irrelevance. There are very few headlines in the morning news that I have not yet seen online. What I haven’t seen are opinions, columns, and in-depth journalism, yet these are precisely the components which are shed.

Is there room for two major papers in this town? Probably not. There might not be room for one. But there is certainly room for in-depth local news and opinion.

if there's room for almost 40 radio stations, six TV stations, two billboard companies, a slug of shoppers in the mailbox, and your odd airplane towing a banner you can't read, there's room for two newspapers.

assuming they are covering and printing stories. that's the differential. the argument has always been that you can cram a whole half-hour TV news script into one page of a paper. make that a section, as all the big color pictures and stuff take up lots of room.

the problem comes when there is more news on a story in your average 27-second TV script page than in five column inches. for me, an old J-school graduate, the answer is to turn more reporters loose, and not have as many assistant page editors, special features departments, and the like.

a nasty last resort is the "joint operating agreement." this exists in a number of towns, in which one paper gets rid of its physical facilities, and prints at the other paper. when these agreements expire, one paper dies. scripps just hung up on two papers the other day.

a better analogy if all these competing fishwraps can't make a go of it is to form an independent mechanicals company, as Hubbard and Midwest did to build the Shoreview antenna farms in the early 60s. the presses are spun off into PrintCo, and the papers own a majority of shares in the new business. PrintCo has customers, the papers don't duplicate facilities that are all back-end costs, and you don't have face-offs over, say, mysterious laptops and non-compete folders on the grounds of one company or another.

that's worth thinking about, instead of flushing another dozen reporters here and another dozen reporters there, until Lillie News' weekly papers starts looking like the twin cities' next Pulitzer candidate.

"What can newspapers do to stop the slump - or are they doomed to shrink until they collapse like guttered-out stars?"

The latter.

Within a year or two, the Pioneer Press will probably fold. How many metro areas have more than one daily paper? NYC, Chicago, Boston, DC, Dallas (and Ft. Worth), Tampa (and St. Pete), SoCal, SF/Oakland/San Jose, that's about it. And all of those markets are larger than the Twin Cities. Why buy either local paper when you can read them online for free??

I don't know why I even subscribe to the Star Tribune anymore. I guess because you can't read a web site while sitting on the can (well, you could, but it wouldn't be the most sanitary use of a laptop). People are disappearing from the Strib as well, including Mr Lileks, whose "Daily Quirk" was a favorite read of mine. There are fewer pages in the paper now, I'm expecting to open the paper one day and find all the comic strips crammed onto one page, which will require the use of a magnifying glass to read them all.

After being an avid newspaper reader for decades, I stopped getting the paper about 18 months ago. Well, I still get the Sunday paper for the comics.

I will not read a local paper for any national or world news. There are better sources on-line.

The route to go is to emphasize the local. I will check out that section and I also read my neighborhood paper to see what is going on. I am not going to find that information out anywhere else. State stuff is also good as the main news wires don't cover them very well.

One of the reasons that buzz.mn is interesting is that it is a start in the local direction.

Revive investigative journalism.

There are so many things that newspapers could have done to keep me and others like me as subscribers/readers, but the time to do it was years ago. Perhaps the latest rounds of cuts will force newspapers to get competitive and smart about the marketplace, but I worry that all the majority of the people that are leaving are the ones that have the knowledge about how to make the necessary changes. Maybe all those folks should start up their own paper...imagine the talent that it would have instantly.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Set a fair price and charge it to everyone for subscriptions. Charging new customers teaser rates that are ridiculously cheap is an insult to the best customers. Charging me more than what it would cost me to buy the paper at a convenience store is a rip-off.

2. Along the same lines, it makes no sense to me to charge the same amount for the "e-edition" of the paper as the one delivered to my doorstep. I would pay for the former if it was priced in a way that made it an attractive alternative, but I'm not paying the same amount to save the Strib the expense of delivering me the paper.

3. As others have mentioned, cover local issues that don't get covered anywhere else. That should be obvious but I often find better info at mnsun than on the big two websites. Maybe it is because ownership is no longer local?

4. Charge for website content and organize it like the newspaper. I pay for WSJ.com, which I believe is one of, if not *the*, most successful newspaper run subscription websites. WSJ.com organizes things similarly to the print version and things that I find in the print edition are actually available on the website -- always. I can't tell you the number of times I have read something in the print Star Tribune and I've tried to find it on the website and it just isn't there. Of if I do find it using search I have no idea how I would have found it by simply navigating the site.

5. Find better delivery drivers. 10-year old kids were better at delivering papers 30 years ago than the adults that do the job now. I finally quit taking the Star Tribune because of endless issues with the delivery driver. If it rained, the paper was inevitable not in a bag or the bag's opening was on the upslope of the driveway so the bag filled with water. If I went on vacation and requested the paper be stopped, I'd get home to find all the missed copies stacked up like cord wood in my driveway. Even when I finally got fed up and canceled my subscription, I continued to get the paper for months. It is obvious to me that the delivery system is flawed if that is allowed to happen unchecked. Getting a district manager to phone me back about these issues was about as unsuccessful as getting the delivery person to car about his/her job.

6. No matter how much you try to advertise your classifieds, time has passed you by. Sorry about that, but it is true. I see bus ads promoting the Star Tribune Classifieds now. On the few occasions I have inquired about placing a classified ad (including obituaries by the way) it was so exorbitantly expensive that I gave up on the idea...and that was before the internet. Now that there are cheap/free alternatives where I can easily upload pictures of my item or run an ad until it sells, it wouldn't even cross my mind to pay by the word for a newspaper classified ad. And it wouldn't cross the mind of people wanting to buy something to look there as the source. If that is what has been supporting newspapers for all these years, then there might be no saving the industry.

If you took any newspaper and reassembled it with only news stories I doubt if more than 25% would remain. Internet provides instant sports, weather, shopping, movies, etc.
I doubt if there is any reason to buy or wait for delivery of news that is days or hours late. And there is nothing that can be done about it. Same with the 30 minute tv newscasts even if they might be more current.

The WSJ does a suburb job of covering national/international news. Neither one of our local newspapers has 5% of the news as the WSJ.

Additionally the local news hardly qualifies as news. Mostly human intrest, and rinky-dink events which are way overblown, cause there's nothing else to write about.

IMO, the City Pages does a better job on investigative reporting than either paper.

IF (a big IF) there was investivgative / connect the dots reporting it might revive our local papers. The Strib is simply a mouthpiece for the 30 yr entrenched leaderless ultraliberal government in Minneapolis.

Once the city wide wi-fi is in place, even more people will be connected, and they will be able to find the ad's on line / print their coupon / etc. I predict circulation will drop even more.

but I honestly think if a paper came along that was actually balanced and encouraged investigative reporting, it would have a sky high circulation. I remember the last time I picked up the Star Tribune and every single leading page of every section was straight out of marxist land (Bill Clinton actually a good husband, how to get around US laws and vacation in Cuba, how Somalis are doing such a great job integrating into Minnesota culture, women's highschool basketball feature, etc, etc.) After that I could never pick the damn thing up again since it was pushing an idealogy that I hated.
It makes my blood boil when people say the Star Tribune isn't slanted or biased. Of course it is! Bring balance and then there would be actual debate of ideas and some would win and some would (gasp!) lose. I bet if the investigative reporters were balanced then there would be at least one reporter willing to pursue every scandal. Just think of all the crap they'd turn up. Nope, won't happen. The culture behind journalism is too devoted to a certain idealogy that I believe goes against the very nature of our world. It's doomed.
Have a nice day!

I get the Sunday paper for one reason, coupons, maybe the comics. The rest of the paper heads right to my recycle bin.

I get anything else on-line.

Newspapers are going the way of buggy whip makers, ice deliverymen and whale bone corsets for the simple reason that technology has moved on. Seriously, James, would you swap your iPhone for a newspaper, a black Ma Bell rotary-dial and a photograph?

Newspapers are failing because they don't give me anything that I can't get better, faster, and cheaper elsewhere.

Formerly, newspapers bundled news and entertainment into one package delivered to my doorstep.

I can get the basics of the Strib's AP wire stories anywhere on-line, without the DLF-slanted re-write.

As a buyer, I can search for used motorcycles more quickly, more precisely, and covering a wider geographic area, using Craig's List than the Strib. As a seller, I can reach a larger audience, free.

There are no funny comics anymore. The Onion is funnier than most columnists and City Pages does more investigative reporting of local issues than the Strib.

And the PiPress is simply Strib-lite. Not as relentlessly DFL slanted, but not noticeably better in most categories (their comics are even worse, if that's possible).

Bundled is not always better than ala carte.
.

Doomed, I say!
It's not the papers themselves, per say; that is, it's not the newsprint and hard copy, it's the model they are following.
Doomed.
Those who want to follow the news, do so on the internet.
Those who want to read the comics in the bathroom might still get the paper if the rest of it wasn't entirely irrelevant or downright false.
This is a mainstream media affliction, not simply limited to the newspapers.
National Geographic and the Smithsonian are the only two "information" magazines I get. If they were not given to me as a gift, I would cancel them.
Why?
Because, for more than the last year or so, both magazines have concentrated their articles on global warming; damage to the environment; the damage America or early American colonists or imported American animals or any old "evil white men" (although,to be fair, they did do an extensive piece on how China is totally screwing up their own country and environment) have done to the environment, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum.
I don't care!
Sure, tell me once. Give me a scholarly article. No problemo. But to harp over and over and over and over again on this insanity? Give me a break!
The Star Trib and Pioneer Press both perform in a similar manner. Except they are harping on imaginary political or sports related or police related or some other silly related malfeasance.
Give me in depth news on a variety of in depth subjects without the stupid political or "politically correct" biases and I might read the paper again (just to have something worthwhile in the bathroom). Until then, why would anyone bother?

Two dinosaurs with a combined six feet in the tar pits. Put em out of their misery.

I used to subscribe to two dailies and thought myself well-informed, but after a while you notice nearly everything reported from outside the local area comes from the New York Times, AP, or Reuters, and matches the ideological biases of those organizations. Notions like southerners are inbred cretins, suburbs are soulless wastelands, religion is for the deluded or hypocritical, Republicans are pure evil, etc., are taken as common knowledge. This has become even more obvious since the advent of the Internet, which has the double impact of making the evening paper a recitation of two-day-old news.
And classified ads? I haven't looked at one in years and probably never will again. That's a dead business if ever there was. If newspapers have a future, it will be in delivering news and features relevant to their locale and not making me feel that my subcription money is a donation to the DFL (listening Star Trib?)

yeah!