An American Lion

How many times do you have to read a story like this and smack your forehead?

For a time, the [Washington] Post and many U.S. newspapers relied on big profits at their parent companies to send reporters on coveted assignments overseas and throughout the United States.

More recently, it has been trying to cut costs as ad sales shrink. It also is facing more competition from new news outlets, most notably Politico.com, run by two former Washington Post reporters, and staffed by plenty of other ex-Post workers.

Many U.S. newspapers from The Boston Globe to Tribune Co’s Baltimore Sun have closed bureaus around the country and around the world as they try to save money. Many experts say newspapers have a better chance of surviving if they stop trying to cover the world and report more local news.

“We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience. Nor are we a wire service or a cable channel,” Brauchli told the Post’s media columnist and reporter Howard Kurtz.

While none of the Post’s six national reporters at those bureaus will be laid off, three news aides lost their jobs, the memo said.

Still, Brauchli wrote, the Post will cover the nation.

“We will continue to cover events around the country as we have for decades, by sending reporters into the field,” he wrote.

I hate to have to be the one to explain this to such lofty intellectual types as are no doubt found babbling incoherently into the ceiling tiles at the Washington Post, but I’ll do it anyway: the more you CUT the valuable, readable content from your product, the LESS it is worth to readers. Hence, featuring LESS content means FEWER readers.

Bear with me here.

If I, Norman Rogers, sometimes the President when I want to make ridiculous points about nothing and always fabulous, never feckless, but well dressed and casually enthusiastic about what goes on with the ladies in my life, were to suddenly only post two times a day, and make it filler, that would cut my costs dramatically. I would save about ten minutes per day on this whole blogging thing. However, going from the usual seven or eight posts a day (five of which are filler, two of which are usually safe for work hotties, meaning I only really try to do something interesting once every couple of days, if that) to only two posts a day would dramatically cause my daily “hits” to plummet. I could coast for a while. I have a highly searchable, easily read, and thoroughly tagged and indexed site, and I would maintain a certain number of readers, but I wouldn’t be the incredibly hilarious and fabulous read that I have now. Perhaps it is the old businessman in me, but I work as hard as I can for that forty minutes a day I sort of blog. I bust my rear end, sir. I do it for the kids. I do it because I care. I really do.

So, to explain, once again, how this Internet thing works—if you put LESS content on your site, FEWER people will find and read and enjoy your site. It’s called a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” and the newspaper business has caught the self-fulfilling prophecy bug.

Me? Me, I’m all smiles. This wasn’t filler by the way. Brother, I had to work at this one.