Fort Worth Star-Telegram Continues To Shrink

This morning I read an interesting series of comments at the West & Clear Blog regarding reader's regard, well actually, lack of regard regarding the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's current state of failure.

After having spent a month reading another McClatchy newspaper, that being the Tacoma News Tribune, it is surprising how different the 2 papers are. One would think the Tacoma paper was the one serving the bigger market, but Tacoma's population is just a tad over 200,000. While Fort Worth has over 700,000 people currently residing within its borders. I believe the Star-Telegram circulates more newspapers than the News Tribune.

But the Star-Telegram is a much smaller paper, with a lot more ads and way fewer columnists. Somehow the News Tribune can afford to have more than one columnist on its editorial page.

The comments in West & Clear about the current state of the Star-Telegram's diminishing relevancy were interesting, matching much of what I've observed, including the weird role the paper assigns itself as being a city booster, rather than accurately reporting on the city's many shortcomings.

A guy named Greg wrote an interesting comment about the Star-Telegram's shortcoming's and its resultant disservice to the community. I'll copy what Greg wrote below....

"A paper whose purpose in life has its historic roots in boosterism for the home town is doomed in the long run. It won’t get into controversies that could make Fort Worth look anything less than perfect. And that’s just not interesting. By not digging and finding things that need improvement I guess it’s assumed Fort Worth can look great. The problem is if we don’t expose what’s wrong, how do we ever get better? I mean, I love Fort Worth but I still think we have some areas that fall short of perfection.

Worse, by not digging into city failures and bad ideas the paper leaves the casual observer thinking there’s no reason to take an interest in civic affairs. And so people don’t show up and they don’t pay attention.

A free press is critical to preserving our other freedoms, but only to the extent that it does its job to inform the citizens about their government, including criticizing it. Fortunately we have the Weekly and occasionally the Business Press taking a few shots, but that’s not enough.

I don’t want to imply, though, that the S-T doesn’t have some dedicated and talented people. What it lacks is vision."

Tacoma News Tribune vs. Fort Worth Star-Telegram

My one longtime reader may remember me having a comment or two about the Fort Worth daily to which I subscribe, that being the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The Star-Telegram is part of the McClatchy chain of newspapers.

During my month in Tacoma my daily paper is the Tacoma News Tribune. It is also part of the McClatchy chain of newspapers. Supposedly a chain of newspapers on hard times, hence a lot of cutbacks on employees and the size of the newspaper and the amount of reading material in the newspaper.

At least that's the excuse the Star-Telegram has been giving for their incredible shrinking paper.

The first issue of the News Tribune, that I read upon arrival, had a News Tribune columnist answering reader's inquiries regarding the shrinking size of the News Tribune. I figured, interesting, the Tribune is annoying people in the same way the Star-Telegram is. At least that's what I thought when I read the headline. But no, the Tribune readers were making note of the paper appearing to have not so many pages as years gone by, they were not complaining about the loss of features or columnists or a crummy TV guide.

The Tribune writer explained that the reason their paper is smaller is due to fewer ads.

Now, that is a huge difference between these two papers. At the same time that the Star-Telegram's content has been shrivelling, the amount of space devoted to ads has soared. Sometimes full page ad after full page ad. This morning's Wednesday edition of the Tacoma Tribune had some sections with only 1 or 2 ads! And they were small.

Like the section that contains the editorial pages and letters to the editor, there were only 2 small ads in a 6 page section. The front page section is 10 pages, with 11 ads, 2 of them full page. Except for the full page ads, the others were small.

No wonder it took me a half hour, or more, to read the Tacoma News Tribune. I'm lucky if I can milk the Sunday edition of the Star-Telegram for 15 minutes. Often I'm done with their daily after about 5 minutes. A shorter amount of time than it takes to write this blog.

Another nice thing about the Tacoma News Tribune. Absolutely no mention of Barnett Shale. And no full page Chesapeake Energy ads. And the News Tribune writer talks about TV like a sophisticated adult, instead of sounding like some sort of wonderstruck bug-eyed Gomer fresh from the sticks, marveling that someone on some TV show had, at some point in time, lived in, visited or knew someone who had lived in or visited or was married to someone who lived in or visited Tacoma or anywhere else in Washington.