It's a Wrap

"If a newspaper is recycling press releases, writing one-source stories, or putting out cheerleader stories about how great everything's going — nobody is going to pay for that."

Everybody's talking about the death of printed newspapers. (Well, everybody at printed newspapers is talking about the death of printed newspapers.) But for all the layoffs and financial turmoil, rumors of the industry's demise appear to be greatly exaggerated.

Thanks to the Internet, we can read pretty much any newspaper we want, any time we want — for free. The Republic's content has been online, and free, for 12 years.

We still keep buying the paper.

The Republic had a circulation of 418,344 at the end of 2006, growing to 525,967 on Sundays.

It's worth remembering, in the end, just how big the Republic is, even today. For all the worries about saving a sinking ship, for all the examples of its shrinking influence, it's still the biggest game in town.

And though Bushee says that a half-million people now check out azcentral.com at least once a week, that's still a smaller number than the people who read the Sunday paper alone.

"People are really concerned that newspapers are losing 3 to 4 percent of their circulation each year," McGuire says. "But you're still talking a huge market share. You look at products from laundry detergent to toothpaste — nobody commands that percentage of a local audience. It's still big.

"Everybody focuses on the future, because that's how Wall Street judges things," McGuire says. "But the fact is, the present ain't chopped liver."

Still, you can't blame Wall Street for wondering: Are all those subscribers going to stick around when even the newspaper itself seems to be saying its best days are over?

Bushee says that the skinny Monday paper, for example, didn't result in cancelled subscriptions. But it's hard to imagine it added many, either.

And the changes to the printed paper that have resulted from the new Information Center model are a mixed bag, at best. What comes off as snarky and amusing online, and perhaps, even makes sense in a small-town newspaper, seems odd in a major metropolitan daily.

When the editorial page has already shrunk to three-quarters of a full-page spread on most days, it's appalling to see a whole corner devoted to an unflattering picture of a politician and reader-written captions. And forum posts seldom seem all that illuminating, even when they're onscreen.

In the paper, they can seem downright stupid.

Maybe the Republic is giving readers what they want. Bushee certainly seems to think so.

But maybe not, says David Leibowitz, a former Republic columnist and current vice president of Moses Anshell advertising agency.

He still subscribes to the paper and is happy to list its strengths.

But he's skeptical about its plans for the future.

"Nobody's ever going to say, 'I want a long, complicated narrative about the way things work in the world,'" he says. "But given the chance to read a compelling story, people may jump at the chance. The problem is, they don't often get the chance."

Leibowitz has frequently worked with focus groups. In the advertising world, they have their benefits. But they also have their limits, he warns.

"That stuff can work to your detriment because it relieves you of the responsibility of making a decision," he says. "If you get it wrong, and you've spent thousands of dollars to retrofit a newspaper to the Web — well, it's nice to be able to blame it on what the 'research' said."