The editor of the San Francisco Chronicle has a secret plan for saving his paper: chase the older demographic. SF Weekly:For those of you too impatient to read past the jump, here's the Twitter version of what Bushee said: Chron can't figure out how to make $ from Net, so it's gonna charge more money to old people loyal to print who are scared of the Interwebs.
For those of you still reading (presumably people working in the media), Bushee basically said the Chron is going to deal with economic pressures in the industry by aggressively skewing old.
"We cannot necessarily be a publication directed towards young people at the expense of our older readers—we have to understand that," Bushee told Krasny.
Once again here's my surefire plan for saving daily papers: scare away the old folks once and for all. Those readers are killing you. Go tab, charge a lot more for home delivery, offer papers for free in boxes downtown, put "fuck" in a headline on the front page above the fold (if you haven't gone tab), identify with the cities you're freakin' named for (and the not the freakin' suburb your publisher lives in), and stop swimming with one anvil tucked under your left arm ("family newspaper") and another tucked under your right ("objectivity"). Papers are for adults, not children, and mincing around about profanity turns off adult readers; people prefer openly biased media because letting your bias hang out there is, at least, honest; and, once again, catering to old timers and making sure there's nothing in your paper that can't be read to a six year-old at bedtime turns off adult readers.
And do all this now.
Amen.
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