Over the past few weeks, the editorial staff here at Um has been biding our time. Waiting. Hoping that maybe, just maybe, we’d be presented with something that would pull us away from our school work and force us to return ourselves to our loyal readers.
So we’d like to offer thanks to the marketing geniuses at Creative Loafing, who’ve managed to end this hiatus. These folks–well, really, their publisher-bosses–you’ll remember, are the winners who, only a year-or-so ago bought themselves the perfectly-fine (all profit-hemorrhaging aside) AltWeekly franchise that used to host most of the analog media work penned by the editorial staff here at Um.
And then promptly began shearing that paper’s budget.
Out went various editorial positions. Gone (in all practicality) were certain freelancing opprotunities. Dismissed was virtually the entire production staff. In keeping with what looks like a nation-wide trend, the paper shrank.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, the paper turned to pure service journalism (a controversial proposition that we here at Um highlight only for the fact that we remember making fun of the idea in more than one CP editorial meeting) and…covering college newspapers (likewise).
Okay. So. Times change. Especially if an industry suffers a downturn like the one my former employers are being forced to deal with. And, the man at the top of the masthead (and thus ultimately responsible for all of the editorial content) remains the same Erik Wemple that I learned to respect both intellectually and in terms of those all-important journo ethics. A combination of these facts with that whole profit-hemorrhaging thing might lead one to conclude that a) CP was headed for some sort of financial editing with or without Creative interference b) what’s come out of all this is a publication better situated for these market changes and c) with Wemple at the helm, the best will be made of a bad situation.
‘Course if that were all true, we here at Um would still be working on that piece for our Memoir-writing class.
This brings us back to the Creative Loafing marketing department. According to CP’s Andrew Beaujon, there’s been no small amount of push from said jokers (he calls it “City Paper’s new-found promotional intensity”), a move which recently found my alma up to its neck in trinkets.
Sure, product awareness might help increase circulation. But dumbing it down (read: doinking much of what formerly made the thing a D.C. conversation starter, including, now, its defining cover section, and adding fluffy blog content) will almost surely force formerly loyal readers away from those shiny street boxes.
Maybe CL doesn’t care about those folks. And that might even be just fine. But that’s not gonna change the problem that they have: The paper that they’ve Creat-ed not only won’t hold the interest of the folks who used to love it (and to love to hate it), with the loss of all of its feature content, the thing becomes (with the exception of its perpetually (knock on wood) wonderful Loose Lips column) something that can be beat (scooped, whatever) on virtually every relevant thing.
So thanks. Thanks Creative Loafing. But, to cliche, no thanks.
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October 1, 2008 at 9:05 am
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