A tipster told me the
Cleveland Plain Dealer has gone all-local on its front page. Check out a week's worth of
front page layouts posted on Cleveland.com -- and it is pretty much true. The only national display story in the last 10 days was the Mitchell report on steroids in baseball
Editor Susan Goldberg said in a phone interview that the new policy was not formally announced -- the paper simply did it. National and international stories are regularly teased on a left-hand page one news rail, "but we wanted to get away from putting commodity news that everyone knows already out front." The policy is a logical extension of the thought, "hardly an original," Goldberg said, that people can get up-to-the-minute national and international news many places on the Internet so the core remaining news franchise for a regional paper is local.
But don't loyal print edition readers still expect a ration of national and international news on the front page? "I do hear that from some folks," Goldberg said. "Frankly it is partly generational." Late-breaking or extremely important national and international stories can still earn a spot on the front, she said.
The local-local movement has steam and even papers like the Boston Globe run many more local stories out front than they used to. But to my knowledge, only the mid-sized East Valley Tribune in the Phoenix suburbs has taken a version of the Cleveland plunge.
Typically, these kinds of bold moves (think dropping the stock tables a few years ago) catch on if the pioneers are successful. I wouldn't be surprised to see a number of metros trying the all-local front in 2008.
The Biz Blog has gone on holiday break. We will return January 2 with a roundup of year-end newspaper stock prices. Please put away sharp objects before reading.
