Plain Dealer

Front page, top right corner, above the fold, Sunday edition – Terrence Egger begs his readers to save him.

Normally, the PD might sell the space now featuring Egger’s mug shot.  Egger then devotes an entire page on A5 of the Sunday paper, also apparently un-sellable to advertisers, to more begging.

In his piece, Egger, begs.  And begs.  And begs.

Myths die hard, but the fact is that newspapers in general — and The Plain Dealer, specifically — remain the most widely viewed, most far-reaching, most influential local media outlet in the community.

Egger notes the business decision he made to not publish full election results from this week’s election.  Paper is expensive!

Frankly, we fouled up last week when we failed to publish all of the local elections details in print (they were all available on Cleveland.com, our online partner).

Which itself is hilarious – the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections’ website had these same results, online, well before the PD’s incomprehensible website – why not go there to get them? Cuyahoga BOE has finally found an entity more incompetent than the Cuyahoga BOE! Egger’s tool…er….reader rep, Ted Diadiun, devotes his entire weekly column in the same section to said cost-cutting.

Some readers surmised that we failed to run the results in the paper Wednesday because we didn’t have them at presstime. That’s not true. We had the results – the question was whether it was a wise investment to print extra pages to carry the information.

Wisdom! Last week’s Sunday column featured Diadiun wisely banging his chest because his employer’s monopoly made his employer Number 1 in a one newspaper town. All in response to the latest circulation figures showing another double digit quarterly drop in PD circulation, a cycle that is accelerating.  In the same Forum section, Roldo notes Brent Larkin’s sad, pathetic victory lap over Issue 6’s passage, as Larkin declares war on Cuyahoga County Democrats.

Egger’s bragging and the full-page Pee Dee ad trying to take advantage of the community’s dysfunction for its commercial purposes strikes me as a bit gross, especially this week.

What’s going on? The last few weeks of the PD have been one increasingly loud plea after another to save them from themselves, which really is nothing new. Going all the way back to Connie Schultz’s laughable and now universally ignored idea to ban linking for a 24-hour period in which newspapers get to keep their monopoly, the PD has been using it’s property to campaign for its survival.

But now, Egger, the publisher is….er….commenting. Hmmm…..where have I seen that before? Two weeks before the PD announced pay cuts and furloughs in March, that’s where.

But if you are as clueless about your own bottom line as Egger seems to be – claiming to make money in 2009, then two weeks later cutting pay and forcing furloughs – that doesn’t bode well.  It suggests a profound lack of understanding of your current situation.

Egger’s protesteth-too-much act in March was in response to another drop in circulation which gave rise to the infamous Time Magazine report that the PD would go all digital by the end of 2009. Refusing to print full election results, because they are available online, sure looks like going digital! I digress.

The clock is ticking louder for the PD.  If I were a PD reporter, I’d have my resume all nice and shiny. Ya’ll are free to join us here at the new Plunderbund!

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