Suzanne Loudermilk once posted on Facebook about the two things that most impressed students when I spoke at her Writing for the Media class at Towson University. One was about the crossword puzzle. (More later.)
At one time, my office at The Baltimore Sun was adjacent to the reader editor's, so I often heard from Ed Hewitt about the things that concerned subscribers.
The paper discontinued a column written by someone in features, and a couple of dozen readers asked about it. The editor, John Carroll, discontinued the local column by Roger Simon (now the late Roger Simon), and a couple of hundred readers asked what happened. The Sun dropped the London Times crossword puzzle, and four thousand readers complained.
We were repeatedly reminded how much our core readership was devoted to crossword puzzles. When someone in production decided to print the generic crossword puzzle on one side of the page and the New York Times crossword puzzle on the reverse side, we learned that in many households one spouse worked the generic puzzle while the other did the Times puzzle, and they could not do it over the morning coffee when both were on the same sheet of newsprint.
That is loyalty, and that is why I told Ms. Loudermilk's students that there are two bedrock principles of newspaper journalism.* The main one: Don't fuck with the crossword puzzle.
If you run a publication and are sensitive to your readers, you know their habits and their preferences. When you do not, disaster ensues.
The Washington Post, under the direction of its owner, Jeff Bezos, declared that its editorial page, normally center-left-to-liberal, should restrict itself to business-friendly, i.e., right-wing views. A migration of readers began. Then the Post management determined that sports coverage in the paper was superfluous and dismissed most of the sports staff. It turned out that Post readers are interested in sports, and they, too, left. The paper reversed course and tried to hire back the sports staff, many of whom had been snapped up by other publications.
The Post in the last few years, has lost half a million subscribers, and good luck luring those readers back.
So there appears to be a third bedrock newspaper journalism principle: Learn who your readers are.
* Yes, you'll want to know the other, I suppose. It is that you will drink too much and you will marry twice. Someone commented online, "Only twice?" I answered, "To date."
