Visual Editors
Visual Editors, NFP was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit in 2004.
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charles apple
Superhero
Joined: 09 Mar 2004
Posts: 3734
Location: Norfolk, Virginia
Posted:
Wed Feb 02, 2005 10:32 am
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Reviews of new Examiner 'mostly positive'
Annys Shin of the Washington Post reports:
| Quote: | | Metro riders had mostly positive reviews of the debut edition. John Newby, an attorney getting on the Metro at McPherson Square yesterday afternoon, called the Examiner "a good alternative to Express," saying, "It has a lot of information." |
Another excerpt from higher in the story:
| Quote: | Some local residents who went to look for the debut issue, however, said they had trouble locating one.
"I couldn't find one outside," said Mary J. Johnson, a federal government worker who said she searched Examiner newspaper boxes outside her downtown office building yesterday morning in vain.
Others, who received postcards last week informing them they would receive a copy, woke up this morning to find they hadn't. Hawkers appeared at stops along the Orange and Blue lines, but apparently not at many Red Line stops in Montgomery County, according to commuters.
"As far as I know, the paper is going out with few glitches," publisher James McDonald said yesterday afternoon. "No significant problems were brought to my attention." He added that he had not yet seen the latest field reports. |
Read it in the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55812-2005Feb1.html
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Examiner debut prompts change in WP front page
Anne C. Mulkern of Anschutz' hometown paper, the Denver Post, reports:
| Quote: | The Washington Post introduced a major change to its front page Tuesday, a move executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. said was "not exactly" coincidental on the day The Washington Examiner arrived. The Washington Post began using different front pages for Virginia, Maryland and D.C., the same thing the Examiner is doing.
"The fact that the Examiner itself has a zoned front page certainly made it a timely time to do it," Downie said.
He said the paper had been discussing the change for many months.
The Post also increased the size of a front-page box that highlights stories inside the paper, amplifying it to about one-third the paper's bottom half.
"[The Examiner] was a pretty decent debut issue," said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. "It looks and feels like a real newspaper as opposed to a cheap giveaway. I didn't see a whole lot of original reporting, but it was smartly packaged."
The longer-term question, Kurtz said, is whether the paper can have a journalistic impact by providing news other papers lack or whether it will serve largely as "an advertising vehicle." |
Today's Washington Post front:
Read it in the Denver Post:
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~33~2686626,00.html
Both items via Romenesko:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45
_________________
-Charles |
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charles apple
Superhero
Joined: 09 Mar 2004
Posts: 3734
Location: Norfolk, Virginia
Posted:
Sun Feb 13, 2005 4:43 pm
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Chain of free metro papers 'doable'
David Armstrong, of the San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday on Philip Anschutz' Washington Examiner:
| Quote: | "Do we have a pre-planned list of cities and a time line for opening papers in them? No,'' said publisher Scott McKibben. ..."Might there be opportunities in other markets that we would seriously look at? Absolutely, yes.''
Industry analysts say starting a national chain of free papers would be difficult but doable.
The Examiners are attempting to capture readers by delivering copies to affluent households coveted by advertisers. Advertisers underwrite the entire cost of a free-circulation paper. Traditional newspapers get 75 percent of their revenue from ads and 25 percent from single-copy sales and subscriptions.
The desired profit margin for newspapers is 20 percent, said John Morton, the principal in Morton Research of Silver Spring, Md. With no subscriptions or single-copy sales, free dailies might have to settle for 5 or 6 percent margins, but for a billionaire like Anschutz, that might be enough.
The risk for Anschutz is that readers will miss the depth and detail of quality broadsheets. Or that too many potential readers have already defected from newspapers to online sources like blogs or to talk radio. Or that would- be readers won't develop the brand loyalty they give to paid papers in our you- get-what-you pay-for world.
Free dailies could succeed, however, if publishers buy them at fire-sale prices to avoid the huge cost of starting a paper from scratch, keep operating costs way down, charge low rates to attract advertisers and, above all, stay free to avoid going toe-to-toe with major paid papers like the Washington Post and The Chronicle. |
Read it in the Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/11/BUG9EB9EI81.DTL&type=business
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D.C. Examiner 'barely a serf, let alone a monarch.'
Slate's Jack Shafer pontificated Thursday about the new free-distribution Washington Examiner and how it fits into the history — and future — of newspapers:
| Quote: | Unbundling payment from delivery is an audacious, expensive gamble. But with a fortune of $5.2 billion, Anschutz can afford it—he's wealthier than Charles Foster Kane, the publisher protagonist of Citizen Kane. When chided in the movie by a financial overseer that he's losing a million dollars a year on his newspaper, Kane quips, "You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in—60 years."
Like theatrical productions, new publications deserve a try-out period before being judged. That said, it's not premature to describe today's Washington Examiner as a mash-up of short local stories by staffers, brief wire pieces, and abridged articles from the New York Times and other newspapers. In other words, the Examiner has unbundled from its pages the depth and breadth one ordinarily expects from a metropolitan daily. This young paper is barely a serf, let alone a monarch.
Yet the Examiner isn't the only local unbundler, just the most conspicuous. On the Web, Craigslist and eBay are unbundling parts of the newspaper classified market, as are jobs sites (Monster, CareerBuilder, et al.), various car sites, and search engines.
The Washington Post has fought the unbundlers and falling circulation—down 10 percent for the daily edition over the past two years, according to this November Post story—by unbundling chunks of its once-unified advertising portfolio. Its parent company now chases AWOL readers with a bevy of free, specialty publications about apartments, new homes, moving to D.C., retirement living, and cars, not to mention the Express ("designed to be absorbed in 20 minutes," says its Web site). Coming soon from the Post Co. are free pubs about weddings and golf. In the November Post story, Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. told his newsroom of his plans to win readers back with shorter stories and bigger graphics. (Shades of the Examiner!) |
There's quite a bit more. Read it at Slate:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2113319/
_________________
-Charles |
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