Whenever I visit my wife in Northern Virginia and I read her copy of the Washington Post, I find myself reading stories I know I would have passed over in my local paper, The Florida Times-Union. Why is that? The question has been bugging me since Christmas.

I think what is happening is that the Post has such an aura (of…what?) around it that it just automatically makes everything seem interesting. Although, I think it is not so much that I think what is in the Post is more interesting, but that I make the opposite assumption about the T-U.

The T-U does not have the same staff as the Post, my thinking goes, so the coverage and the story are not going to be as good. Or maybe it’s the headlines. I am going to really watch myself read this week to try to see if I can understand what’s going on.

I do think that, based on my initial observations, cutting staff and thereby cutting the quality of the product, is not the way to go. You can only cut so much before you not only make decision not to read, you make the decision not to buy.

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In other words, people think they are just “phoning it in.” People also think this is especially egregious because of the millions of dollars many of the players make.

I don’t think anyone, even the lowest paid worker in the country, ought to just phone it in. You owe it to yourself, and not to anyone else, to work your hardest, to do your best every day. That’s a great question to ask yourself at the end of the day: did you do your best?

As a journalist involved with newspaper design, it is easy to just toss together a page instead of considering whether you are telling the stories of the day in the best way possible. Each day is an incredible challenge to bring readers the best presentation, given the facts, and whether it is on A-1 or B-12.

In today’s world, newspaper design is incredibly important, even though many publishers don’t seem to think so. It can make the difference between keeping or losing readers.

Get excited about the important work you do on behalf of the readers. Don’t just phone it in.

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According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, newspapers’ online revenue in 2009 hit $2.7 billion. This while newspapers’ print revenue continued to fall to about $24 billion, about half what it was in 2000. So the good news is that newspapers aren’t bleeding as much.

It may not be a financial savior, but I hope it’s enough to keep newspapers alive for awhile, if only online. I still say they are our best hope for the future because their newsgathering staff, as cut back as it is, is still superior to that of broadcast stations. Let’s face it, if you want local news, you are going to get it from a newspaper web site, not a television station.

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As might be expected, newspaper designers, led by the Society for News Design, complained in a loud voice.

SND complained that designers are critical to the success of newspapers and then tried to give reasons why design is important.

Design IS important, but designers are not. A lot of designers, and SND itself, created this problem years ago when designers began acting like art directors for magazines. Many newspapers, especially the large ones, hired design staff. Then they began justifying their own existence.

Newspapers don’t need art direction. They don’t need pages that look like magazines.

What I think is important here is the distinction between being a designer and being a visual journalist. Being a good visual journalist, helping to tell the story is what is important. This can be done from a central desk. It’s not optimum, but it is do-able.

I think newspaper design is a crucial part of being a good newspaper. I just don’t think you need “designers.” It may be a matter of semantics, but it is an important distinction.

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Consumers are most likely to pay for movies and music (sort of expected) and least likely to pay for content that is user generated, i.e., social media sites, consumer-created movies and blogs.

IN THE MIDDLE are news and information sites, such as newspapers and magazines. The problem once again is that consumers can access a lot of news and information for free. As long as that choice is around, it is going to be very difficult to set up paywalls.

A friend of mind who is a publisher of a small daily in North Carolina told me recently that his great paywall experiment is going like this: more than 4,000 subscribers to the print editing, a little over 350 to the online version. It may seem like a small number, but it’s a start.

In the Nielsen study, consumers had a few requirements for content they would pay for. For instance, 71% said that content would have to be much better before they would consider paying.

That leaves a door open it seems to me, because quality is something we can control. This means stop the cutting of the newsroom: they are your only hope to survive. They are not an unjustifiable expense.

For the full read, go to: http://tinyurl.com/yka7vez

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