A survey of six North Carolina daily newspapers shows readers get only a small amount of local political and government news, and even smaller exposure to state political and government news.

Source.

Local news -- not just politics, but all kinds of stuff -- is the only way local papers can distinguish themselves in the media marketplace. Ample local coverage is their best survival strategy, and one the N&R has explicitly endorsed.

But you can't report the news without reporters, and they've cut staff and pages so much that they can't do the one thing they need to do well.

JR takes issue with the report before saying, "Should we do more? Absolutely. Limited staffing and space hinder us." 

Not at all unrelated: N&R's remaining local opinion columnists (that would be Davenport Jr. and me) are down to once a month.

Comments

[Ryan Shell]

Lots of space on the Internet.

[Bubba]

"N&R's remaining local opinion columnists (that would be Davenport Jr. and me) are down to once a month."

Davenport deserves more placements.

Perhaps you could ask Hammer if you could come back to the Rhino.

[Andrew Brod]

The N&R's stable of local columnists used to include me and my UNCG colleague Keith Debbage, both of us once-a-monthers. When the N&R decided it would no longer pay us, I moved my column over to the BizJ (where the zero paycheck is a given) and Keith mostly stopped writing columns.

[Ed Cone]

"Lots of space on the internet."

True, but you still have to pay people to fill it.

[David Hoggard]

I was a twice-a-monther at the N&R for a couple of years. It concerned me when they said I was being dropped due to budget restraints, because I was writing for real cheap.

Truth is, though, it was getting be kind of a chore. That reminds me of what Yes!Weekly's Brian Clarey told me a couple of weeks into my stint.

Writing a newspaper column is kind of like dating a nymphomaniac.

For the first few months, the relationship is heady and exciting and you can't wait to get home and get started. But as the months drone on, as deadlines come and go, you find yourself saying, "damn... not THAT again"

[N&R Reader]

It is predictable that John Robinson would defend anything that say the News & Record does not pull its weight in terms of providing local news coverage. It is amazing to me that they are consistently beat by local papers such as Yes Weekly, 99 Blocks, the Business Journal, and the Rhino Times in terms of covering local stories and features.

It seems to me that all of those newspapers have smaller staffs compared to the N&R, so perhaps the News & Record should dispense with the "limited staffing" and "space" excuses and ditch the majority of the national AP stories and try to provide more local coverage for a change.

[Ed Cone]

I also get more news than ever before from the weeklies (and the blogs).

To be fair, the weeklies make no pretense of comprehensive coverage, which is what the daily paper tries to offer. The weeklies put their tiny staffs on a few stories, the N&R puts its larger (if decimated) staff on the whole landscape.

Limited staffing is not an excuse, it's a reality, and the constraints it imposes are serious ones.

The problem (as I see it, and I'm just an outside observer, although I work in the same industry) is that the bosses cut as if this was a routine downturn, and then kept cutting muscle and bone as the problems worsened, rather than realizing that the entire business was changing and they needed to rethink the whole operation.

[Marshall]

I wonder if JR is not going to do what other local papers are doing which is stop paying for content like Ed and Davenport Jr. offer once per month. Why would JR not participate in the trend? If folks want to contribute at zero compensation then they can similar to Brod.

Why would I pay for Ed's column when I can read it here for free.

[Ed Cone]

JR does not run the section for which I write, and budgets are not ultimately set by editors.

You can read my column here because I write it for the newspaper, not the other way round.

Free content is now abundant, but, as Hoggard notes above, producing print-ready content on a regular deadline is not as easy as it looks.

I'm not arguing against rethinking the whole opinion section, along with the rest of the paper and the business model.

But what seems more likely to happen to the opinion section is that it will look much the same on the surface, but it will be filled with more syndicated comment and more paid-to-parrot think tank content.

[Andrew Brod]

Ed, that's already happening.

[Ed Cone]

Yep. I'm projecting the trend line, not looking into a crystal ball.

[Roch101]

Why hasn't the N&R reported on the fallout from WFMY's black book fakery? It's not the number of stories that are a measure of a newsorg, it is the extent to which people better understand their community because of what they do -- or not.

[Just a guess]

Sadly, the N&R isn't what it was just 5 or 10 years ago.

The paper doesn't have as much local content as it used to in any sections - News, Opinion, Sports or Life. The people there seem to be doing the best they can and I don't blame them. But the current staffing level simply isn't sufficient to produce a quality paper day-in and day-out.

It's a Catch-22 for the newspaper industry. They've slashed staffing because revenues have dropped. But how can they even increase revenues with the current bare-bones product?