Ashley: H-S positioning itself as "the dominant paper" in Durham

The Duke Chronicle just wrapped up a three-part series on the changes and challenges in local news -- including both college and local major media papers in the process.

Of particular interest: Bob Ashley's comments on the current travails at the N&O and the Herald-Sun, from which he seems to speculate that the venerable Durham paper could emerge in a stronger position:

Conversely the Herald-Sun has tried to fill the niche for purely Durham-centric news items.

"The News and Observer is retreating from the Durham part of its market," Ashley said. "We're asking people to really push hard right now in what we see is a moment of weakness for our competition and see if we can once and for all establish... the dominant paper in the market by a considerable margin." [....]

He added that in-depth reporting and writing are areas in which The Herald-Sun hopes to improve in the future.

Read more over at the Chronicle.

I suspect Ashley's right about having a moment of opportunity; with the N&O's retrenchment, a move driven as much ore more by larger McClatchy issues than by the Triangle market, the daily newspaper competition has eased up for now.

Still, for Ashley to enter the position he's looking for would seem to require the paper to find a way to grow its besieged subscription numbers -- or to make a strong online play, something that has been a greater focus over at the N&O.

Incidentally, the Chronicle's article has the latest count I've seen of staffing: a reduction in H-S staff "from 87 newsroom workers in January 2005 to approximately 40 today."

[Obligatory disclaimer: I occasionally write a column in the N&O's Saturday Durham paper as a paid freelancer.]

Comments

[GreenLantern]

I hope they follow through on this, with neighborhood stories, plenty of photos, diagrams, and maps when there's new development proposals. If they do, I'll strongly consider subscribing. I get a free Saturday edition of the N&O Durham News, but I'd rather have a full week of a hometown newspaper that focuses on my city, rather than the Triangle as a whole--which usually means mostly Raleigh, unless there's a shooting or scandal in the Bull City.

[Rob]

When did the H-S trim the paper's width? Picked one up today and it is now a noticably narrower (physically) paper.

[PJ]

I'd pay $$ for better content on the web... just don't make me get the paper version on my driveway. Not sure how they'd do that. I guess my eyeballs on their web page regularly increases their ad rate?

[Michael Bacon]

I rather hope they follow the lead of papers around the country and cancel the AP feed. I would be much happier with a substantially slimmer paper, given that the AP stories they run are always the shortened versions and are always light in number.

[Ray Gronberg]

The width reduction occurred Monday.

It is a cost-cutting thing that other papers have done, and not just in these days either. Newsprint is hideously expensive and also a hugely variable expensive that's subject to big market swings. All the papers I've worked at in 20+ years in the profession have gone through periodic cutbacks in response to upticks in the price of newsprint. Reducing the "web" width helps with that in good times and bad.

[Dan S.]

PJ, in order to get anyone to actually pay for their web content, they'd need to hire a... web editor. They fired the last one in January 2005, then limped along as a senior copy editor updated the website... in his spare time. Now, they've "retired" the senior copy editor, which is why the newspaper's website can go the course of a weekend without a single update, save the AP feed.

[hurley]

I don't know anyone under 50 who gets the Herald-Sun or who watches the network nightly news.

They're both done. Like the telegraph.