Sometimes I just have to say, “what the fuck?” and the royal we doesn’t work as well. These are my thoughts—raronauer

For all the talk about declining subscription rates, it turns out the newspapers don’t really care that much. Papers are selling 10 percent fewer copies than they were in 2000. But many papers are cutting back on ventures that would help them get subscriptions anyway, the Times reports today.

Raising subscription rates does not appease advertisers, and the cost of getting a new subscriber through cold calling and other methods is significant. So many newspapers have just resigned themselves to a lower circulation, hoping that a bigger Web presence will make up the difference.

Some papers, like the Dallas Morning News, are actually cultivating a lower circulation. Last year, it limited its distribution to a 200-mile radius, and this year has cut back again to a 100-mile radius. Trying to reach more readers didn’t make sense, according to publisher Jim Moroney:

We were distributing in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, way down in south Texas. … It cost too much money getting the papers to those places, and this clearly wasn’t anything our advertisers were giving us value for. … But I have no regrets … The people who really want to read The Dallas Morning News can still get it online.

The New York Times’s circulation has done relatively well during the past decade. Its New York circulation is down, but its national and international circulation has made up for it. Hell, the Times is even available in Little Rock. And as for local news, readers in Little Rock never got that from their big regional paper, anyway.

As for readers going to dallasnews.com, um not so much. Why would anyone go to dallasnews.com over the nytimes.com? The Dallas News’s Web site looks like it came out of 2002. The layout is confusing and limited, and compared with the Times’s homepage, it is just plain ugly.

Readers who can no longer subscribe to the Dallas Morning News will turn to papers like the Times for national and international coverage, not just for the quality of its reporting, but also for the quality of its Web site.

Big regional papers may not realize it yet, but they’re getting squeezed. There will always be a need for local news that the Big Three can’t cover. But mid-sized papers like the Dallas Morning News can't afford to offer local coverage outside of Dallas, and they’re purposefully losing readers who turn to them for their national stories. These readers are going to go to the papers with better Web sites and better reporting.

Newspapers may be in the on the joke that the Internet is slowly killing print, but they don’t get that there’s no market for a mediocre news site.