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Dorman: Don’t scrap opinion pages to please angry readers

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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Todd Dorman
Jun. 30, 2022 7:00 am

Last Sunday, a letter writer, Bruce Williams, pointed out that newspapers across the country are curtailing their opinion page offerings. Unfortunately, he’s correct.

For example, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, is urging its newspapers to cut back on the number of days each week opinion pages are featured. They’re dropping syndicated columns, ending unsigned editorials, which reflect the views of editorial boards not one writer, ending endorsements in federal races and highlighting “expert voices” over “political hacks.”

Uh oh.

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The Des Moines Register, owned by Gannett, now has opinion pages only on Thursday and Sunday. The paper says it’s focusing more on local issues, offering solutions and featuring “true experts.” The paper says readers are tired of content aimed at “stoking divisions rather than offering solutions.”

This, of course, is survey driven.

“Readers don’t want us to tell them how to think,” according to an internal Gannett presentation reported by the Washington Post. “They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues. They perceive us as having a biased agenda.”

The presentation argued editorials and columns are “among our least read content.” So I guess the lectures are poorly attended. Opinion content is frequently cited as a reason readers cancel subscriptions.

Some of this is perfectly fine. Local issues and expert perspectives certainly are important. I’m all for solutions. but as someone who grew up religiously reading the Register’s opinion pages, it’s a sad state of affairs.

Granted, I don’t have Gannett’s audience survey data in front of me. But I’ve been working in the local opinion factory for quite a while now. It doesn’t take a numbers-cruncher from MIT to see what’s going on.

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Gannett and a lot of newspapers are chasing after conservative readers who don’t like reading stuff they disagree with in the paper or online. Not all conservatives feel that way, and of course, folks on the left do plenty of complaining about conservative content. Ask me about Mallard Fillmore, a comic which appears on the Insight page. But the overwhelming pressure on newspapers to become timid bastions of bothsidesism is coming from the political right.


So get rid of liberal columnists (it’s always liberal columnists who need to go) and play it safe with divisive issues, debates and elections. While America’s information ecosphere is being choked by the sludge of enormous lies and misinformation, it seems like a bad time for newspapers to curtail publishing fact-based commentary on its opinion pages.


I’ve watched the newspaper industry do a lot of chasing over the years. And in many cases, we made changes that alienated people who respect and value what we do to capture readers who really don’t. You can ax opinion sections, but, spoiler alert, you’re not going to make angry readers happy. When outrage is like a hobby, there’s always a new target.


We’re fully committed (I hope!) to local opinion, seven days a week, in print and online. We run four syndicated columns per week. We run letters and plenty of expert guest columns addressing state and local issues. We have a liberal local columnist, with more than 25 years of experience covering Iowa politics (an expert, maybe!), and a conservative columnist. Unnamed editorials? Well, I’m the only full-time opinion staffer at this point, so make an educated guess.


We still value Insight. We hope you do, too.

 
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