Another view of cutting stock listings

Bernie Kohn, the assistant managing editor of the Baltimore Sun, sent me this perspective on cutting stock listings in the business section, which should be required reading for anyone put in such a position by upper management at his or her newspaper.

Kohn stated: “I have cut the listings twice in less than two years as business editor at the Baltimore Sun. In neither case was it a pleasant experience. The first time, it was a mandate from above — which made me wiser the second time around.

“Most of us in the business editing business, I believe, now face two choices: Cut listings your way, or wait for the bean counters to cut them their way. It’s the latter that threatens the continuing existence of business sections.

“Bean counters see anything falling into the category of ‘commodity content’ as utterly disposable, and there is no winning intellectual argument to be made with them — except perhaps by some of my friends in Florida — that agate is not commodity content. So if you try to continue as is, you run the risk of all of those pages simply being eliminated by fiat. No agate, for most of us, means no section.

“But by cutting them your way, you give yourself a fighting chance to keep the section. At the Sun, we chose to go to a one-page-plus presentation that is almost half customized local content; with the other page that formerly was agate, we brought back a series of theme pages that, in essence, revived junior versions of pecialty sections killed by bean counter fiat over the past couple of years.

“Reader blowback was about what we expected – 250 or so calls, a half-dozen or so cancelled subscriptions, a couple of dozen notes of praise for adding the theme content. In other words, we survived. The alternative, losing all the agate and the section with it, would have been far worse.

“Now if some accountant type wants to come after our section, we can show he’s coming after local, distinctive content. I like my chances with that argument a whole lot more.”

A nice perspective frome someone in the trenches on a daily basis.